The Tale of Kaho

i came to this one knowing it was Murakami and still was not quite ready for it. that is always how it goes with him. you think you know what you are getting into and then twenty pages in you realise you have no idea and you have stopped trying to figure it out and you are just reading.
Kaho is one of his more grounded protagonists at least at first. she works in a small record shop in Tokyo, she lives alone, she does not talk much. Murakami writes her interior life with that very specific quality he has where a character can feel deeply lonely and also completely fine about it at the same time. then the sound starts. she hears it in her apartment at night. faint and low and coming from no direction she can identify. her neighbours hear nothing. her friend thinks she is tired. but it keeps coming back.
what i love about the way Murakami handles this kind of thing is that he never explains it and he never makes a big deal out of not explaining it. the sound just is. Kaho starts following it in the way that characters in his books follow things, quietly and without very much drama, and that is how the story actually starts moving.
there is a man she meets, obviously. there is always a man in these books. but the relationship here is less central than in something like Norwegian Wood or South of the Border West of the Sun. he is more like a companion to the mystery than the mystery itself. i thought that was a good choice. Kaho's own interior life is interesting enough that i did not want her to disappear into a romance.
the section in the coastal town is where the book really opens up. i will not say much about what happens there but Murakami writes that particular kind of quiet Japanese seaside atmosphere in a way that made me feel a bit cold while reading it even though i was sitting in a warm room. there are a few scenes there that stayed with me for a while after i finished.
is it his best book. probably not. if you want to start with Murakami start with Norwegian Wood or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. but if you have read those and you love him then this is exactly what you want from him in 2026. the same dreamlike quality, the same jazz references, the same slightly detached narrator observing strange things with total calm. it is a very Murakami book and i mean that as a compliment.