La Jornada: The Story of Kaho, the new novel by Haruki Murakami with a female narrator

The next novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami: The Tale of Kaho (Kaho’s story), which will be published in Japan on July 3, will be the first with a female protagonist and narrator. The text, published by Shinchosha, will have 352 pages in which it will address the life of a young author of illustrated books.

A fragment of the title released by the publishing label reads: “To tell the truth, this is the first time I have met someone as ugly as you.” To Kaho, a 26-year-old children’s book illustrator, a man she had just met suddenly blurted out these words.

“She, who was neither particularly pretty nor intelligent, but just a little curious, was simply surprised, rather than angry or shocked. ‘What is this man trying to tell me?’ However, from that moment on, all kinds of strange events began to happen around him.”

It is the first long narrative by the Japanese author after the publication of The city and its uncertain walls in 2023 (which was published in Mexico in March 2024).

The fact that “Kaho is the first solo female protagonist to appear in a complete Murakami novel,” as Shinchosha reports, is important due to a series of criticisms that the author’s work has had for the way in which he develops women in his texts.

So far there is no data on the English or Spanish edition of this story, which has been the center of great reservation, since in 2024 Murakami held a reading of the story called “Kaho” before a limited audience. The journalists present were allowed to report the names of the stories, but not their content.

That year, an account of the cycle from which the novel began was published in The New Yorkertranslated into English by Philip Gabriel. That encounter with the man who insults the 26-year-old protagonist and its consequences are described there: “I should never have seen that man again, Kaho thought. I was sure of it as I walked briskly toward the exit. When Machida called me that time, I should have made it clear. ‘No, thank you,’ I should have said. ‘I never want to see that person again.'”

“It was curiosity. Curiosity brought me here. I think I wanted to find out what the hell this man was up to, what he wanted. I think I wanted to know. But it was a mistake. He used curiosity as bait to cleverly lure me in, like a spider would. A shiver ran down his spine. I want to go somewhere warm, he thought. The desire was stronger than ever. A southern island, with a white sand beach. Lying there, closing my eyes, turning my mind off and letting the sunlight wash over me. caress.”

In an interview with the American newspaper The New York Times In February, Murakami said that writing from a woman’s perspective is “something unusual, but natural.” Regarding the character in the book, he commented: “I became her,” and noted that he found in this novel a much more optimistic mood than his previous works.

The text originated from four short stories published in the Japanese magazine Shinchothe last of these last March.

Murakami is one of the most popular and acclaimed novelists in the world, debuting with Hear the Wind Sing in 1979, four years after he began writing while managing a jazz bar in Tokyo. Her 1987 romance novel Tokio Blues It was his first bestseller, which established him as a young literary star. His last best-selling novel was The city of uncertain walls.