A New Murakami Novel Coming out on April 13!

It seems as if the pandemic should have been a perfect time for blog writing, but for some reason I abandoned it for almost two years, which seems hard to believe. Sorry if this has created any disappointment. The flip side is that I have many things I want to post about. 

Let me start with the newest: there is a brand new Murakami novel due to appear in two days. This is the first novel since Killing Commendatore, and people are really excited about it. 

Shinchosha, the book's publisher, made the first announcement on January 31 (pictured below, left), which says only that the book will appear on Thursday April 13, that it is completely new, 1,200 pages long and that it is his first full-length novel in six years. Within a few hours of seeing this announcement, I heard from a number of friends who had seen it on different social media and online newspapers. The Polish Murakami publisher, Muza, also wrote to me, quite enthusiastic about the prospect of a new Murakami coming out.

About a month later, on March 1, came the reveal of the title -- Machi to sono futashika na kabe -- and the cover (pictured below, right). The appearance of the English title in the center of the cover, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, doesn't mean that the book is already available in English. It is just that in recent years, when released in Japanese, some of Murakami's new books have had English titles included on the covers. Shown below atr two pictures of the Japanese versions of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and Killing Commendatore, both of which feature a title in English. Of course, it would take a couple of years before the English translations of these books appeared under these titles. One wonders if including the English title on the Japanese cover is in preparation for translation, or whether it is simply to make it easier for people outside Japan to talk about a new book before it is available in English (or any other language). 

 

 

 

 

 

If The City and Its Uncertain Walls sounds familiar to some of you, it is because a short story, or rather a novella, with the same title (with an additional comma after machi to) appeared in 1980 in the literary magazine Bungakukai. It was later included in Murakami's collected works (Murakami Haruki Zensakuhin 1979-1989), but it has not been translated into English. 

 

Because it is believed to be a story from which Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was developed, I am really curious to see in what direction this new novel will go. It's worth noting that in Alfred Birnbaum's translation of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, machi is translated as "town" (the Town). The new cover uses the word "city." Is it the same machi as in the novella, or a different one? Or has the Town grown into a "city"?  I wonder how this will be handled in English translation. 

The newest teaser from Shinchosha that came this morning (April 11) features a quote from Murakami explaining that he started writing the book in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and that it took him almost three years. He hardly went out, didn't take long trips, and worked steadily on the novel:

 

 

 

Probably a bunch of us Murakami translators will be working on the new novel at the same time. I am already looking forward to the exchange of ideas.