From Detachment to a Mother's Face — How Haruki Murakami Arrived at The Tale of KAHO

The early period: beginning after the loss — the Rat trilogy

Murakami's starting point is always "after it is already over."

Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball, 1973 (1980), and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). The three share a friend called the Rat, and so they are known as the Rat trilogy — and, after the title of the closing volume, also as the Sheep trilogy. The protagonist is a nameless "I" who drinks beer, listens to records, and speaks in a flat, restrained voice about the women who left and the people who died.

What the trilogy portrayed was the sense of emptiness left behind after the political season had ended. Around 1970 the fever of the student movement cooled, and the young returned to ordinary life without having changed anything. Murakami's "I" does not proclaim that defeat. If anything, not speaking of it is itself a stance. Go too deep into the world and you only get hurt — a resignation. To protect yourself by staying uninvolved: this is detachment.

That is why the prose of this period has its distinctive lightness. Dry, translated-sounding metaphors, the proper nouns of American music and brand names, the "yare-yare" way of keeping one's distance. It stands deliberately apart from the damp tradition of the Japanese I-novel, urban and stateless to the touch. This was not mere stylishness but a technique for keeping a proper distance from the world.

Yet to file the trilogy under "lightness" alone is to misread it. In the last of the three, A Wild Sheep Chase, something shifts. A transcendent being — the "Sheep," which has manipulated people and moved the centers of power — appears, and the "I" is dragged, against his will, into the search. What began as a private story of loss starts to stretch its gaze toward an invisible, larger force: the structure of the system. And the Rat chooses to die with that Sheep still inside him.

The trilogy was the completion of detachment, and at the same time a warning of its limits. Staying uninvolved could no longer last.

The middle period: down to the bottom of the well

In the late 1980s Murakami swings once toward realism. Norwegian Wood (1987), a love story that faced death and loss head-on, sold explosively and made him a national author. In Dance Dance Dance (1988) that followed, he grasped the high-capitalist society through the phrase "cultural snow-shoveling," while trying once more to recover the connections that had been lost.

It is in this period that a motif destined to define the later Murakami takes hold: the well. Descend vertically from the everyday surface and you reach the bottom of consciousness, the darkness of the unconscious, the underside of time. Go down, pass through the dark, and come out somewhere else. This vertical movement becomes the spine of every long novel to come.

In fact, the image of that well rises most vividly at the very opening of Norwegian Wood. It is the "field well" that Naoko describes, its mouth gaping somewhere in the meadow — its depth and bottom unseeable, cunningly hidden by the grass around it, so that one never knows when a foot might slip. Into this single well is folded everything Murakami's wells can mean. One is the depths of the unconscious and the self. As in the theory of the psychologist Jung, the well signifies the region of the unconscious beyond the reach of individual awareness; to peer into it is to confront the madness and darkness lying at the bottom of one's own heart. One is the border between death and life. For Naoko, this well was the very lure of "death." Prone to being trapped in the world of the unconscious, she is drawn as if dragged into that darkness, and in time takes her own life in a forest. And one is the trap hidden within the everyday. The well concealed so cunningly by the grass is also a metaphor for the unreasonable fate, the loss, that appears without warning in anyone's life.

The "I" who slid so lightly sideways in the early work begins to descend straight down. No longer a distance for not being involved, but a descent for being involved deeply. Quietly, the ground was being laid for the turn.

The turning point: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Japan's wartime aggression

Then comes The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Books One and Two, 1994; Book Three, 1995). Here the texture of the ground changes.

A man searching for his vanished wife climbs to the bottom of a dry well in his garden. In that darkness the story connects to an unexpected place: Manchuria, Nomonhan, and the violence of the Japanese army. The testimony of Lieutenant Mamiya, who watched a soldier flayed alive on the Mongolian steppe. The massacre at the zoo. The dark at the bottom of the well and the dark at the bottom of history are joined by a single vertical line.

This was a decisive step for Murakami. Until then his fiction had been seen as the work of "a writer who does not depict history," "a writer who does not write about politics" — a man who rendered private interiority and loss in a polished style. And yet in Wind-Up Bird he descended, through the well, into a territory postwar Japanese literature has often avoided head-on: the history in which Japan was the perpetrator, and the responsibility that comes with it.

What matters is that it takes no form of sermon or indictment. History invades the protagonist's private life — as the memory of violence, as malice (his brother-in-law Noboru Wataya), as a bruise surfacing on the body. The violence of history is not sealed in the past; it seeps, continuous, into the here and now of daily life. And so there is no escape. Staying uninvolved is no longer possible. Detachment ends here, completely.

That this turn was no private whim was proved by the reality that followed at once. In 1995: the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack. Murakami interviewed those touched by the Aum Shinrikyo affair, gathering the voices of victims and former believers into the nonfiction works Underground (1997) and The Place That Was Promised (1998). In dialogue with the psychologist Hayao Kawai, he spoke in his own words of having chosen "commitment." Why do people get pulled into evil, into violence, into closed narratives? This becomes the theme of everything after.

1Q84: invisible violence and the evil of the system

1Q84 (Books One and Two in 2009, Book Three in 2010) unfolds that question on a grand scale.

Aomame and Tengo seek each other in the year "1Q84," a world shifted just slightly from our own. Behind them stand the cult "Sakigake," the uncanny entities called the Little People, and the violence — sexual abuse, domestic violence — that occurs inside families and communities. The evil here has no clear face like Noboru Wataya's. It is drawn as the system itself, which draws people in and reproduces itself, rather than as any single villain.

The Aum-like imagination — the machinery by which a closed narrative ensnares a person and justifies violence — Murakami here sublimates into the form of a novel. Good and evil do not divide cleanly; they trade places without cease. Even the one who keeps the balance (the Leader) cannot be judged simply. It is a work in which the theme of "evil and history" opened by Wind-Up Bird is raised to a more abstract, structural register.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki: forgiveness and the repair of a bond

In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013), Murakami turns back inward, and toward a small place.

In high school in Nagoya, Tsukuru Tazaki belonged to a group of five in perfect harmony — until, one day, he was cut off without a word of explanation. Why was I the one cast out? Carrying that old wound into adulthood, he visits the others one by one, facing the truth of the past. After the vast narrative of historical violence comes a violence far more intimate and universal: the shutting-out of one person from a group.

The devices of fantasy are restrained; the story is quiet and introspective. What is asked here is not indictment but whether the one who wounded and the one who was wounded can nonetheless retie the bond — the possibility of forgiveness and repair. The writer who opened toward history now narrows his gaze to the one-to-one relationship. The theme of responsibility descends from the scale of society to the scale of the space between two people.

Killing Commendatore: making the memory of aggression appear once more

In Killing Commendatore (Part One, "The Idea Made Visible"; Part Two, "The Shifting Metaphor"; 2017), the theme of historical aggression returns head-on.

A portrait painter, living in the house of the Japanese-style master Tomohiko Amada, comes into contact with a single sealed painting and with the family's buried past. What appears there are two historical violences: the Anschluss in Vienna, and the massacre at Nanjing that Amada's brother experienced. A hole in the earth, the sound of a bell, the "Commendatore" who steps out of a painting as a metaphor. The motif of the well-as-hole again leads down to the bottom of history.

More than twenty years after Wind-Up Bird, in an age when the language of historical revisionism had begun to wield open power, Murakami once again chose "to make the memory of aggression appear." To summon back into this world what had been sealed in a painting, left unspoken. To make the past visible, against forgetting, is itself placed as the writer's ethical act.

(In between, Kafka on the Shore (2002) handles the Oedipal myth of patricide and the memory of war, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2023) the border between consciousness and reality. This piece follows the major works along the line of responsibility and history, but these too rest on the same stratum.)

And The Tale of KAHO: the theme of responsibility folds back to family and to a single woman

On 3 July 2026, The Tale of KAHO, his first long novel in three years, was published by Shinchosha. Reports call it his sixteenth novel. Here the line traced so far turns clearly in a new direction.

The protagonist is Kaho, a twenty-six-year-old picture-book author. This is the first long novel in which Murakami places a woman as the sole protagonist. Aomame of 1Q84 was one of two protagonists alongside Tengo, so this is the first time a single woman stands at the center of a story. The novel is said to open with a scene in which a man she has just met tells her, "I've never had a partner as ugly as you." A detached house in Musashisakai, a commission from a couple of anteaters living beneath the floorboards, a picture book she draws of a "girl searching for a face" seen in a dream, and a development in which her mother appears to have been taken over by something — reviews around publication read the work as a family story that confronts the mother-daughter relationship head-on. It began as a linked series serialized in the literary magazine Shinchō between 2024 and 2026, later revised and expanded.

Murakami himself has said that he "thought it might be about time to take on the family stories I've hardly ever written" (in an interview with the Nikkei). Set within the whole of his career, that single remark carries considerable weight.

The "responsibility" Murakami has handled until now lay on the outside. The history of Japan's aggression, evil as a system, the violence of the group — each was a structure in which "I" (usually a male protagonist) engages with, and takes on, something large that lies beyond the self. But The Tale of KAHO folds that theme back into the innermost, inescapable unit. Not the nation or history, but a mother and a daughter. Not another's violence, but the domination and takeover that live inside the closest of blood ties.

And he attempts to tell that story not from a male protagonist's point of view, but from the very interface where a single woman touches the world directly. Murakami has long said that what matters in depicting a character is "how that person relates to the world — a kind of interface." A writer who has for years faced criticism over how he portrays women is now, one can read, trying to relocate that interface to the woman's side.

A caveat is in order. Some reviews from just after publication note that even with a woman as protagonist, the Murakami-esque core of "individual self-responsibility" has not wavered (Real Sound). Whether the response is sufficient is something readers will now go on to test. The particulars of the plot, too, are not yet confirmed against the text. Even so, the direction of the movement is clear to see: the theme of responsibility and violence, lowered from the collective and the historical to family and mother-and-daughter, and, for the first time, to the subjectivity of a woman.

A circle, or the nearest and darkest well

Set out this way, the four decades trace a single circle.

In the early Rat trilogy, Murakami chose not to engage with the world. In the middle period he dug a well and learned to descend vertically. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he joined that well to the bottom of history, opening a door to the outer dark of Japan's aggression and responsibility. In 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore he went on drawing that dark as invisible evil and forgotten memory. In Tsukuru Tazaki he narrowed his gaze to the one-to-one bond.

And in The Tale of KAHO, he descended for the first time into the nearest well, and the hardest to climb down into — the space between a mother and a daughter, and the place where a single woman touches the world.

The writer who began in detachment has moved the object of his engagement from his own loss, to the history of Japan, and at last to the most intimate other. The circle that opened wide toward the outside is folding slowly back inward. At that fold, The Tale of KAHO now stands.