Gitte Marianne Hansen is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Newcastle University, UK. An AHRC Leadership Fellow, she is PI for the project 'Gendering Murakami Haruki: Characters, Transmedial Productions and Contemporary Japan' and the author of Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan: Navigating Contradiction in Narrative and Visual Culture (2016).

Michael Tsang is due to take up lectureship in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests lie in world/postcolonial literatures and media with an East Asian focus. He has published in Japan Forum, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, andothers, and is the founding editor of Hong Kong Studies.

[...], Murakami Haruki is a challenge, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Michael Tsang Part 1: Temporal and spatial dimensions 2. From hara-hara to doki-doki: Murakami Haruki's use of humour and his predicament since 1Q84 3. History and metaphysical narrative space 4. Murakami Haruki's Tokyo: Spatial transformation and sociocultural displacement, disconnection, and disorientation 5. Food culture, consumerism and Murakami Haruki: The kitchen in 'Z¿ no sh¿metsu' Part 2: Narrative and genders 6. Murakami's first-person narrators and female character construction 7. Voyeuristic gaze, narratological construction, and the gender problem in Murakami Haruki's After Dark 8. Man without Woman: Sexual relationship in the postmodern era 9. Escape from stereotype? Male-male sexuality in the fiction of Murakami Haruki Part 3: Literary dialogues 10. Ask the horse: Murakami's views on literary creation and the nature of inspiration 11. Modern Japanese and European genre history in Murakami's and S¿seki's coming-of-age novels 12. Trumping 1Q84/Nineteen Eighty-Four? Reading Murakami and Orwell in a dystopian era 13. Manifestations of creativity: Murakami Haruki as translator Part 4: Personal stories from the industry 14. Chasing wild sheep: The breakthrough of Murakami Haruki in the West 15. Two old translators recall the Murakami phenomenon 16. To build a pile of sleeping kittens, trying not to wake them: Rebecca Suter interviews Murakami Haruki