Haruki Murakami

Most authors don't write simultaneous futuristic thrillers and pastoral fantasies about people with slashed eyes. Most authors don't write about chains of events set off by a missing cat. Most authors don't write about 15 year-old Oedipuses.

Most authors are not Haruki Murakami.

Murakami's works include twelve novels, dozens of short stories, an autobiography, and a non-fiction book of essays and interviews exploring a terrorist attack on Tokyo's subways that occurred in 1995. He achieved literary super-stardom in Japan with the publication of Norwegian Wood, but opinion is very much divided among the Japanese literary community whether he is a genius or a purveyor of somewhat odd popular fiction. His fans say, why not both?

Fiction:
Novels:
 * The "Trilogy of the Rat"
 * Hear the Wind Sing
 * Pinball, 1973
 * A Wild Sheep Chase
 * Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World
 * Norwegian Wood
 * Dance Dance Dance
 * South of the Border, West of the Sun
 * The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
 * Sputnik Sweetheart
 * Kafka on the Shore
 * After Dark
 * One Q Eighty Four

Short story collections:
 * The Elephant Vanishes
 * After the Quake
 * Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
 * Let's Meet in a Dream (in collaboration with Shigesato Itoi)

Non-Fiction:

 * Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
 * What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Murakami's fiction often concerns dreams, sex, violence, the inexplicable, loneliness, parallel worlds, and cats.

His work in general and Murakami himself provide examples of:

 * Amnesiac Lover: The narrator imagines that he and his dream girl are actually both examples of this in "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning".
 * Author Appeal:
 * Murakami seems bizarrely fixated on ears, for some reason.
 * He's also a huge jazz fan. In a 2007 essay for the New York Times Book Review, he discussed his his prior career as a jazz club proprietor in Tokyo, and the influence and inspiration that his writing has drawn from jazz music.
 * He also loves reading--basically all of his main characters are avid readers.
 * Wells and cats also appear in much of his work.
 * Badass Bookworm: The author himself, who is a triathlete and marathon runner (which is the main subject of his memoir).
 * Dream Sequence: In almost every book.
 * Erotic Dream
 * Food Porn
 * Kindhearted Cat Lover: Just about every protagonist, thanks to Author Appeal.
 * Literary Allusion Title: Pinball, 1973's title is an allusion to Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry (Japanese title Football, Man'en 1 ).
 * Love Hurts
 * Magical Realism: And how!
 * Mind Screw: In almost every single book.
 * Nameless Narrative: A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World.
 * No Export for You: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 have never been published outside of Japan (with the odd exception of Thailand), as Murakami is not anxious for a wider audience to find his earliest work. Translations into English have been published for students of English in Japan, and can be found here and there on the internet..
 * Old Shame: Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.
 * Trilogy Creep: Dance Dance Dance to the "Trilogy of the Rat".
 * Two Lines, No Waiting: Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World, Kafka on the Shore, One Q Eighty Four.
 * What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic