Culture | Strange and familiar places

What Haruki Murakami’s fans get wrong about him

He is not so much a surrealist as a dogged observer of solitude

Author, Haruki Murakami, in the Aoyama area, a part of the city where Murakai often likes to walk. Murakami poses for a photograph with a yellow background in Tokyo, Japan.
Murakami, a singular writerPhotograph: Panos Pictures

PHILIP ROTH never really left New Jersey. Saul Bellow could not keep his characters out of Chicago. And Haruki Murakami’s narrators—unmarried, often middle-aged men with solitary habits—continually slip into eerie netherworlds.

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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Strange and familiar places”

Culture January 4th 2025

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