One of Japan's most famous writers, Haruki Murakami, gets compared to American giants like Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut.

But he is a one-of-a-kind writer known for his surreal stories of adventure and for simple and gentle love stories too.

I'm Meg Wallitzer and coming up on Selected Shorts, a slice of the Japanese writer's imagination

on display with stories you've likely never heard before. Hold tight.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

If you're a fiction lover, you already know and love Japanese writer Haruki Murakami,

who has been producing extraordinary work for more than 35 years.

You've read the English translations of works like 1Q84 or The Wind Up Bird Chronicle,

and we've featured plenty of Murakami's short stories right here on selected shorts.

But for the sake of our

uninitiated listeners, I'd like to introduce a few of his trademarks so you can begin to

understand what kind of writer Murakami is. Here we go. A lonely guy, a mysterious disappearance,

a parallel dimension, a faceless villain, jazz, spaghetti, talking cats. The list goes on, but suffice it to say

that Murakami's motifs stay with you. They're sticky enough that illustrator Grant Snyder

created a very funny cartoon for the New York Times in 2014 titled Haruki Murakami Bingo,

a playful distillation of Murakami's obsessions,

Cats and All.

I bring this up not because Murakami is a predictable writer, but because it's interesting

to watch our favorite writers grow and change over time.

As we read, we find out which of their fascinations fade away and which remain,

which of their stories get reshaped and retold,

and which stories spring up unexpectedly and surprise faithful fans.

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