When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki.
Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
This book is undeniably hip,full of student uprisings,free love,booze and 1960''s pop.It''s also genuinely emotionally engaging,and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows''Independent on Sunday.
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949.He met his wife,Yoko,at university and they openet a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat.The massive success of his novel Norwegian Wood(1987)made him a ntional celebrity.He fled Japan and did not return until1995.His other books include Dance Dance Dance,Hare-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,A Wild Sheep Cbase,The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,Underground,his first
work of non-fiction,Sputnik Sweetheart,and Soutb of the Border,West of thd Sputnik Sweetheart,and soutb of the work of F.Scott Sun.He has
translated into Japanese the work of F.Scott Fitzgerald,Truman Cppote,John Irving and Raymond Carver.
Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese literature at Harvartn University.He is the author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words and he has also translated Murakami''s Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Cbronicle.