The sky today is oddly blue, the air unseasonably warm for late October. The leaves outside our big glass panes are amber and gold, but the sun is shining through them. I soak up as much of it as I can. Soon the storms will come, and I will need the memory of sunshine on my face to get through December.

In a collection of six short stories he compiled and called "after the quake," Haruki Murakami describes the lives of six random people in the immediate aftermath of the 1995 earthquake that killed 6,434, injured 43,792, and displaced 310,000 citizens of the city of Kobe, Japan.

The brick-and-mortar shop is coming out swinging against online retailers.

Cats, jazz and wild dreams make up the writer’s beautiful novellas.

Before Haruki Murakami became the most famous living Japanese novelist who achieved the rare feat of capturing the hearts and minds of American readers as well, he was a young married man working numerous jobs in order to make ends meet.

His former friends all have colors in their surnames -- “red,” “blue,” “white,” and “black” -- while Tsukuru does not. Indeed

According to the Korea Times, Murakami made similar efforts to communicate with his readers during the '90s via his official

Non-runners don't get it, but Matthew Inman, aka "The Oatmeal," does. In offering strategies for how to stick with it, he provides advice that's familiar to anyone who has ever struggled to maintain athletic or dietary discipline; "shut up and run" is a ruder variation of Nike's spot-on campaign to "just do it."

I've found that many booksellers, when faced with the sometimes daunting task of deciding what to read next, have developed their own idiosyncratic "strategies." Often secret, until now.

Early in October I flew to Minneapolis and ran my first marathon. It's astounding to me how many people do this on a regular basis because it really is a long way to run. What I want to talk about, though, is how I ran my first marathon with Haruki Murakami.

Murakami's books have for me served as a commentary on Gatsby. I read his work as if with a Gatsby divining rod, alert to allusions embedded in his narratives, which confirm my understanding of the classic.

One of the great struggles of any creative profession is coming up with an ingenious and original idea in a timely manner. Lightning strikes of inspiration are often few and far between, which makes it hard to convince people to give you money for your ideas.