Tokyo's Treasure

In the U.S., where foreign-language translated literary novels rarely hit bestseller charts, Haruki Murakami's success is even more praiseworthy. His new book, Kafka on the Shore, sits just below our top 15 hardcover fiction top-sellers. It is #7 on the Book Sense National independent bookstore list and debuts at #3 on the San Francisco Chronicle list. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, called Murakami "our greatest living practitioner of fiction." Kafka garnered a number of starred reviews, including one from PW ("a fearless writer possessed of a wildly uninhibited imagination and a legion of fiercely devoted fans"). That legion of fans has helped make this book a fast bestseller. Many of them, according to Knopf, even built Web sites for the author; the publisher also used the Web to build buzz. Murakami is Tokyo's most popular novelist and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. There are 40,000 copies in print of Kafka. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, published in hardcover in 1997, is, Knopf said, his bestselling book so far. It has had net sales of more than 150,000 copies (20,000 in hardcover, 130,000 in paper). Knopf and Vintage have published all of Murakami's books in the U.S., and combined sales in hardcover and paperback total about 600,000 copies.