And that includes me."

It is with a Wild Sheep Chase, his third novel published in 1982, that Murakami begins to delve more into the surrealistic, dream world of the opposite sex. A girl whose unusually beautiful and super-sensitive ears confer extraordinary pleasures: "She'd shown me her ears on occasion; mostly on sexual occasions. Sex with her ears exposed was an experience I'd never previously known. When it was raining, the smell of rain came through crystal-clear. When birds were singing, their song was a thing of sheer clarity."

Murakami's fiction that include characters' with workaday mundane lives are often abruptly interrupted and sent irrevocably off course into some dreamlike worlds by the most apparent insignificant events. For example, in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle the narrator is searching for a missing cat and comes to a vacant lot and later to the bottom of a well, through which he travels...
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