Looking for books similar to Murakami Haruki's style

I like Murakami's books for their complexity, how they make you think, weirdness, and style of writing. What other books might a fan of his work like?

edited 19th Oct '16 7:30:54 AM by WriterGirl2015

Haruki Murakami was inspired by Franz Kafka and Dostoyevsky, both of whom wrote some extremely weird stuff. In terms of strange complexity, maybe Philip K Dick?

Hm, so you're probably looking for something with surrealism and magical realism? With a shade of ambition? A few thoughts:

• The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro is the other big Japanese name in modern literary fiction. He generally writes muted, realistic fiction grounded in beautiful sorrow, but this novel of his is the most controversial for its unusual structure and atmosphere. Here, he sought to capture the shifting world of a dream, with its rapidly changing relationships, stretching of time and space, and sense of anxiety.
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie. A modern take on the Orpheus and Eurydice story, woven in a history of rock and roll. It's a novel of East meets West, of old Greek mythology meets modern rock legends.
• The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov. One day, the Devil comes to Soviet Moscow. Like the previous suggestion, this is a story about two worlds: Pontius Pilate in the time of Christ, and the devil in atheistic Moscow.
• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. Leaving magical realism for strange sci-fi dystopia. Wallace's encyclopaedic novel is a funny, surreal mammoth about drug addiction, the pressures of talent, tennis academies, rampant commercialism, mind-altering videos and Quebecois wheelchair assassins.

David Mitchell's number9dream.

Japanese setting, dreamlike atmosphere, and it was written by Mitchell's own admission at a time when he was heavily into Murakami. You can tell – in fact, there are quite a few online reviewers saying it's too much like Murakami.