Sometimes dreams act as portals between these realities. Murakami has often spoken of the theme of two dimensions, or realities, in his work: a normal, beautifully evoked everyday world, and a weirder supernatural realm, which may be accessed by sitting at the bottom of a well (as does the hero of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or by taking the wrong emergency staircase off a city expressway (as in 1Q84). Sara came to me and said, 'You should go back to Nagoya and find out what happened.' When I was writing the book, my own character came to me and told me what to do … The fiction and my experience happened at the same time, in parallel. 'When I wrote that short-story part,' he continues, 'Sara, girlfriend, came to him and she said, 'You should find out what happened then', so he went to Nagoya to see his old friends. So his secret was not to be dissolved the mystery was going to stay a mystery.'īut he hadn't reckoned on the inciting power of a woman to move the story forward, as Murakami's female characters so often do. 'I just wanted to describe that guy, 36 years old, very solitary … I wanted to describe his life. 'In the first place I had the intention to write a short story,' Murakami says.

Tsukuru, its 36-year-old protagonist, is still in mourning for the years before he went to university, when he was part of an inseparable group of five friends – until one day they told him, without explanation, that they never wanted to see him again. These days he lives near Tokyo, having spent periods in Greece, at Princeton and Tufts universities – where he wrote his masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – and recently in Hawaii.) It contains passing mysteries like the pianist who sees auras, but it is also a mystery novel in a larger sense. (Murakami was born in Kyoto to two literature teachers, and grew up in the port city of Kobe. Tsukuru Tazaki, as the author calls his own novel for short, sold a million copies in two weeks when it came out last summer in Japan. Murakami is relaxed and affable, rather than forbiddingly gnomic. The world's most popular cult novelist is sipping coffee in the sunny library of an Edinburgh hotel, which – perhaps disappointingly for admirers of his more fantastical yarns – is not reached through a labyrinthine network of subterranean tunnels.

Haruki murakami tsukuru tazaki