This will be his first novel in six years. The famous writer Haruki Murakami is preparing a new book, to be published on April 13 in Japan, his Japanese publishing house Shinchosha said on Wednesday February 1, without revealing its title or its subject. Asked by AFP, Shinchosha was also unable to say immediately when translated versions of the novel will appear. The publisher merely stated that the Japanese manuscript represented 1,200 pages.
74-year-old Haruki Murakami has been consistently considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for years. Translated into fifty languages, his work alternately disenchanted, fantastic, absurd or realistic spans four decades and includes ten novels as well as short stories and essays.
Among his best-known novels are Chronicles of the Spring Bird (1994), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009). His short story "Drive my car" was adapted for the cinema and the film won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2022. His last novel, Le Meurtre du Commandeur, was released in 2017 in Japan and the following year in France.
Although his works are extremely popular both at home and abroad, Haruki Murakami shuns fame and rarely appears in public. Aside from a regular radio show in Japan that he DJs, he says little about world affairs outside of his books, "because it requires careful thought and choice of words," he said.
A library dedicated to the writer, collecting his manuscripts and his discography, was inaugurated in 2021 on the campus of Waseda University in Tokyo.
