FOLLOWING CONTENT (C) NEW STATESMAN 2013The famously taciturn novelist Haruki Murakami has made his first appearance in Japan since 1995. Murakami’s new novel – Shikisai wo Motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to Kare no Junrei no Toshi (the English reads Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage, though this title may change) – has been selling over a million copies each week since the Japanese edition went on sale last month, according to the Associated Press.Murakami spoke at a seminar in his birthplace, Kyoto, to mark the establishment of a new literary prize in memory of the Jungian psychotherapist and writer Hayao Kawai, who died in 2007. Tickets were limited to 500 and issued by lottery. No recording was permitted.The new book's plot - closely guarded until publication - focuses on Tsukuru Tazaki: a 36-year-old railway station architect who returns to his hometown of industrial Nagoya before traveling as far as Finland to discover why he was rejected by his four closest friends 16 years previously, in the hope of confronting them and moving on.Where Murakami’s previous novel, the huge three-volumed IQ84, relied heavily upon allusion, action and surrealist detachment, the new work is said to be grounded in a more traditionally novelistic mode - with a greater focus on characters and their relationships.
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