Desire: Vintage Minis

Part of the Vintage Minis series, Desire gathers five short stories by Haruki Murakami, each one turning over a different face of wanting — hunger, lust, sudden infatuation, and the secret longings of the heart. Drawn from the collections The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and Men Without Women, the stories showcase Murakami at his strange, wry, and quietly unsettling best.

A newlywed couple, gripped by an inexplicable midnight hunger, resolves it with a bizarre robbery. A young man imagines what he might say on meeting the one hundred per cent perfect girl on a spring morning. Across these pieces, appetite of every kind becomes a door into the odd, dreamlike logic that runs beneath ordinary life.

Compact and beautifully translated, this little volume is an ideal introduction to Murakami's short fiction and a distilled taste of his singular imagination.