Recommended Reading

The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, an Afghan man living in San Francisco. He receives a call from an old friend of his father's, living in Pakistan, which brings back bittersweet memories of his childhood in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Amir tells of his idyllic childhood in Kabul, where his father enjoyed much financial success and prestige. With him and his father live their servants, Ali and his son, Hassan. Social class separates the two boys from true friendship. However, they share much of their time in boyhood. Hassan respects and reveres Amir, even protects him from neighborhood bullies.

In Amir's twelfth year, he wins the neighborhood kite-fighting tournament, which, he prays, earns his father's respect. All of Amir's childhood, he feels his father wishes for a more manly son. For the tournament, Hassan acts as Amir's

Masako Katori and her coworkers Yoshie, Kuniko, and Yayoi all work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory in the Tokyo suburbs. Each of the women has disagreeable elements in her home life from which she longs to escape (unresponsive or unappreciative families, abusive spouses, overextended credit lines, etc.). When Yayoi snaps one night and strangles her good-for-nothing husband Kenji, Masako and the others must dispose of the body. Led by Masako, the women engage in increasingly grisly business to liberate themselves, not only from evidence of their crime, but from the social and financial burdens that have been suffocating them. Just as things start to go right, everything starts to go wrong: at least two of the women commit careless, lazy mistakes that betray and endanger the others, and Masako must find a safe way out of the danger that threatens to destroy her.

Two prostitutes have been murdered in Tokyo. Yuriko had been working as a prostitute all her adult life, starting while still at school, where her stunning beauty compensated for what she lacked in intellect and commanded attention from older men. Kazue worked for a blue-chip company and had good career prospects, but was unpopular with colleagues and felt isolated. She chose to walk the streets at night where she hoped to get noticed. Twenty years previously, both women were educated at an elite school for young ladies, and both exhibited exceptional promise prior to their brutal , unnecessary deaths. How and why did this tragedy occur? With narration from Yuriko's embittered, unattractive sister and through the girls' journals and diaries Kirino allows their shocking story to unfurl. As with "Out", "Grotesque" gets under the skin, and Kirino's analysis of the female psyche grips the reader. The extreme need to succeed, and the vicious desire to be accepted in the bewildering environment of modern life is explored here with acute and chilling insight. "Grotesque" is a masterful and haunting achievement.

Alienation, a recurring motif in the works of Murakami, is the central theme in this novel set in metropolitan Tokyo (though this is not explicitly stated) over the course of one night. Main characters include Mari, a 19-year-old student, who is spending the night reading in a Denny's. There she meets Takahashi, a trombone-playing student who loves Curtis Fuller's "Five Spot After Dark" song on Blues-ette; Takahashi knows Mari's sister Eri and insists that the group of them have hung out before. Meanwhile, Eri is being watched in her sleep by someone sinister. Eri also suffers from social withdrawal, a condition often referred to as hikikomori.

Mari crosses ways with a retired female wrestler, now working as a manager in a love hotel (whom Takahashi knows and referred to Mari), a Chinese prostitute who has been beaten and stripped of everything in this same love hotel, and a sadistic computer expert. The story takes place in a world between reality and dream.