Haruki Murakami: Manga Stories

By Haruki Murakami, Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL. Published by Tuttle. 

Hardcover, 144 pages, Colour and B&W, 2023.

Haruki Murakami's stories in graphic novel form for the first time!

Haruki Murakami's novels, essays and short stories have sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into dozens of languages. Now for the first time, many of Murakami's best-loved short stories are available in graphic novel form in English. Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 1 is the first of three volumes, which will present a total of 9 short stories from Murakami's bestselling collections.

With their trademark mix of realism and fantasy, centering around Murakami's characteristic themes of loss, remorse and confusion, the four stories in this volume are:

• Super-Frog Saves Tokyo: A few days after an earthquake, Katagiri discovers a giant frog in this home. The frog promises to save Tokyo from another earthquake, but Katagiri must help him. Is this real, or is Katagiri dreaming? "[This story has] such an engaging mix of realism and fantasy that it takes a while for you to realize what a sad undertow the story has and how much it says about Katagiri's solitary life, his feelings of powerlessness and his dread of another quake." —The New York Times

• Where I'm Likely to Find It: A woman's husband goes missing so she hires detective. As the detective traces the man's whereabouts, he reflects on the meaning of his own life. "A searching Kafkaesque parable about disappearance, loss and coping." —Kirkus Reviews

• Birthday Girl: A woman tells her friend the story of a surreal encounter she has on her twentieth birthday with the owner of the restaurant where she works, who grants her a wish.

• The Seventh Man: The story of a man scarred by the death of his childhood friend in a tsunami. "Although Murakami's style and deadpan humour are wonderfully distinctive, his emotional territory is more familiar—remorse, unresolved confusion, sudden epiphanies—though heightened by the surreal. In The Seventh Man, one of his saddest stories, the narrator recalls the wave that reared up during a freak storm and engulfed his childhood friend." —The Guardian

These new graphic versions of classic Murakami short stories will be devoured by his fans and will provide a new window onto his work for a new generation of readers not yet familiar with it!

**Recommended for readers ages 16+ due to mature themes and graphic content**


About the Author:
Haruki Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won the Gunzou Literature Prize in 1979. He is the author of many novels including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheartand Kafka on the Shore. He has written three short story collections: The Elephant Vanishes, After the Quake, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. He has received numerous international literary honors, including the Jerusalem Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the World Fantasy Award, and the Noma Literary Prize, as well a feature in TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2015. Murakami's work has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Jc Deveney (in charge of adaptation) was born in southern France and now lives in Lyon. He has collaborated with various publishers and his work has been published in Italy, Spain and Argentina. At the Lyon Bande dessinee Festival, he organizes international projects, "Webtrip comics" and exhibitions. He teaches adaptation and theater studies at a school of manga and illustration.

PMGL Pierre-Marie Grille-Liou (in charge of manga illustration) was born in Lyon, France. After graduating from graphic arts school, he worked for magazines, doujinshi and online magazines. He likes nonsense comedy, Sumerian mythology, noir and caricatures, and publishes comic strips, short stories and feature comics. His graphic novel "Jojo, moniteur de ski" (co-authored with B-gnet) was published in 2016 by Lapin Editions.