The new Haruki Murakami novel

Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.

Slate has an excerpt of Haruki Murakami’s new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. It’s more or less self-contained, a story within a story. But of course, even within the excerpt, those nesting frames start collapsing:

Haida stopped and glanced at the clock on the wall. Then he looked at Tsukuru. He was, of course, Haida the son, but Haida the father had been his same age in this story, and so the two of them began to overlap in Tsukuru’s mind. It was an odd sensation, as if the two distinct temporalities had blended into one. Maybe it wasn’t the father who had experienced this, but the son. Maybe Haida was just relating it as if his father had experienced it, when in reality he was the one who had. Tsukuru couldn’t shake this illusion.

“I just silently accept everything as it is,” says another character, Midorikawa. “That’s my basic problem, really. I can’t erect a decent barrier between subject and object.”

There’s also magic, death, and jazz, plus a fair bit of discussion about the value of life and imagination. Just a treat.

• fiction
• Haruki Murakami