When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in 2004, the questions weren’t always characterised by their pithiness. Many of his novels, the interviewer suggested at one point, are
variations on a theme: a man has been abandoned by, or has otherwise lost, the object of his desire, and is drawn by his inability to forget her into a parallel world that seems to offer the possibility of regaining what he has lost, a possibility that life, as he (and the reader) knows it, can never offer. Would you agree with this characterisation?
Murakami’s answer, in full, was ‘Yes’.
Ten years on, his new novel won’t require him to revise that answer a great deal. One of the variations, though, is that the lost object of Tsukuru Tazaki’s desire is not — or not only — a single woman, but four friends (two girls and two boys) from high school.
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