What I Was Thinking About While Reading Haruki Murakami’s New Novel Kaho
A Conceptual World Beyond Realism—and Its Unexpected Japanese Character
I have read Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Kaho: The Tale of KAHO in Japanese. Before saying anything else, I would like to thank Murakami for writing it. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the editors and staff at Shinchosha who brought the book into the world, and to the booksellers who placed it in the hands of readers.
Even before its publication, Kaho attracted considerable attention as Murakami’s first full-length novel with a woman as its sole protagonist. Once people actually began reading it, however, responses quickly divided. Some have offered the severe criticism that Murakami has failed to portray women; others have suggested that the novel may be a masterpiece. I myself felt deeply perplexed as I read it. At the same time, I found myself thinking that Murakami’s fiction may, on reflection, have been like this from the very beginning.
That perplexity seems to me connected with a larger set of questions: What, fundamentally, is a Haruki Murakami novel? What does it mean for us to express something in words, and what possibilities does language open up? Many critics will no doubt analyze the book’s motifs and plot. Here, while avoiding spoilers, I would like to consider the one point that preoccupied me most as I read. Consequently, what follows should reveal very little about the story itself.
One of the defining features of Kaho is that what drives the novel is not concrete human reality. The main animal spirits of the novel are metaphors and abstract ideas. Whether a novelist is portraying a woman or a man, one of fiction’s important tasks is to render convincingly how a person of a particular age, in a particular occupation and situation, thinks, feels, and behaves. When we encounter an insight that makes us say, “Yes, people like this really do exist,” or, “Yes, this is indeed how a human being would act in such circumstances,” we ordinarily take it as a mark of great literature. Realism, in this sense, is one of the central criteria by which novels are judged.
Yet Kaho is not a novel that aspires to realism in that sense. The protagonist may be a woman of a specified age and profession, but the texture of life and psychology peculiar to those attributes is not rendered in minute detail. What comes to the foreground instead is a conceptual structure and linking principle similar to the “well” that recurs throughout Murakami’s fiction: an aperture somewhere in reality leading into another world, through which something from that other side makes its way into ours. Kaho has something of the conceptual art about it, and it is radically minimal. I hear that the book began as a single short story, developed through a series of linked pieces, and eventually assumed the form of a novel. Perhaps Murakami’s creative method appears here in one of its purest forms.
This does not mean that we can simply conclude that Murakami is incapable of portraying human beings in realistic ways or otherwise. His fiction has captivated readers around the world for many years. If the conceptual world he created had nothing at all to do with human life, it could hardly have fascinated so many people. Perhaps what Murakami portrays is not the individual standing directly before us, but a highly abstract and profound conceptual structure behind that person, like structures that emerge in deep learning neural networks supporting today's artificial intelligence technologies. Seen in this light, Haruki Murakami remains an extraordinarily distinctive writer—one for whom there is no substitute.
Consider, by way of comparison, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. As Atwood herself has observed, everything that happens to the women in the novel is grounded in something that has actually occurred somewhere in human history. In that respect, The Handmaid’s Tale is both a dystopian novel of powerful conceptual force and a work of realism. The same could be said of such dystopian classics as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun also carry profound conceptual questions, yet in a calm style reminiscent of the British novelistic tradition they show us how human beings behave in the real world. James Joyce, too, is a writer who plays boldly in the realm of ideas, but the people in Dubliners remain the concrete inhabitants of Dublin. However elaborate the web of foreshadowing and connections behind them may be, the palpable texture of the city and its people is never lost. I once heard an Irish person say that while reading Ulysses, one can see the street corners of Dublin vividly before one’s eyes. The same principle of grounding on the real is at work there.
Compared with these writers, Murakami is strikingly conceptual. A number of place names from Tokyo and its suburbs appear in Kaho, but in most cases they do not evoke the smell of a place or describe its streets. Instead, they function like signs or codes positioned within the phase space of a conceptual universe. Some residue of place may remain, of course, but it is not the essence of the work. The names Scarlett Johansson and Jack Kerouac also appear at important moments, yet the logic of realism does not explain why those particular names are necessary. Everything is conceptual through and through.
I believe this is the core of Murakami as a novelist. For years, discussions of his work have revolved around such matters as how many times the phrase yare yare appears, or the peculiar quality of his Japanese, which often sounds like literature in translation, gained or lost. His stylistic distinctiveness probably contributed to his long and somewhat uneasy position within Japan’s conservative literary establishment. Yet once the work is translated, many of the subtle frictions surrounding his Japanese prose inevitably disappear. It is rather like the observation that Dostoevsky’s Russian can seem rough beside Tolstoy’s: the essence of Dostoevsky’s literature does not lie only in the smoothness of his sentences. Likewise, the essence of Murakami’s fiction lies not in its stylistic mannerisms as such, but in the dynamics of its conceptual world and the strange ways in which its elements intertwine.
That quality is densely present in Kaho. It does not portray a concrete woman; it has no realism; one cannot tell what it is trying to say in the zeitgeist of gender equality, political correctness, and the reactionaries; its symbols are underdeveloped—judged by criteria such as these, it is hardly surprising that some readers should regard the novel as a failure. Others may call it “the culmination of Haruki Murakami” with deliberate irony. Yet if we judge the novel by the movement and depth of its conceptual world, Murakami appears as a writer of almost daunting originality. One may like or dislike his work, but there can be no doubt that he is irreplaceable, the one and only Haruki Murakami.
Recently, while thinking about what to read in a book group I run on the web platform Shirasu, I found myself looking back over Hemingway’s life. I plan to discuss Kaho there with the other members in a few weeks. Conversations with people who bring very different readings to a book are bound to shake up my own ideas. Hemingway, after producing a succession of remarkable works, went through a long period of stagnation. The Old Man and the Sea, published after that interval, was acclaimed, and two years later, in 1954, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The view that this novel brought his gifts as a writer sharply back into focus and helped propel him toward the prize is entirely persuasive.
This led me to wonder whether Kaho might become Murakami’s The Old Man and the Sea. Murakami has often been criticized for the way he portrays women: that his women are arranged too conveniently for his male characters, that their inner lives are insufficiently drawn, and that a kind of toxic masculinity is present in his work. As interest in feminism and gender equality has intensified, some have speculated that the next Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature is more likely to be a woman. Names such as Mieko Kawakami, Miri Yu, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada, and Hiromi Kawakami have been mentioned. Murakami himself may have little interest in the annual commotion over the prize, but the media, especially in Tokyo, have continued to discuss his chances year after year.
Against this background, could Kaho, Murakami’s first full-length novel with a woman at its center, become the decisive work that compels a reassessment of his entire body of fiction? I was interested in that possibility. After a first reading, however, I still do not know. At the very least, it does not seem to be a book that, like The Old Man and the Sea, will be immediately and unambiguously embraced as a masterpiece. Kaho is too conceptual, and perhaps too minimal for most critic's likings. Rather than portraying the concrete life of a woman, it places the mother, the father, Kaho herself, the anteaters, and the jaguar in a space slightly and sometimes vastly detached from the texture of ordinary reality.
Does a universal human essence emerge beyond these symbols? There is an essentialist way of reading literature which assumes that, if we follow its metaphors and symbols far enough, we will arrive at a generic truth about humanity. In the past, Murakami held a series of conversations with the Jungian psychologist Hayao Kawai, and critics have often noted the affinity between Murakami’s fictional world and Jungian thought. Jungian symbols are generally read as bringing something from the depths of the human psyche into view. One might argue that the literary value of works such as Kaho comes into being when a work reaches the point of literary quantum tunneling between the conceptual and the real.
After much rumination, I still do not fully understand what the anteaters, the jaguar, and the other strange entities in Kaho ultimately mean. One senses that something is there, but the interpretation remains suspended. In retrospect, Murakami’s fiction has always been like this. It resists facile anthropocentric or essentialist resolution. Even so, it possesses a certain kind of reality. The difficulty is that we cannot clearly explain what kind of reality it is. Such a criticism might appear to be devastating for Murakami. However, are dreams not, by their very nature, much the same? Aren't Haruki Murakami novels constructed from such stuff that dreams are made on?
Kaho is a novel to which it is perhaps difficult for a critic to give a coherent account and say, “This is what the book is.” In that sense, it may be a work of art in one of its purest forms. At the same time, it is a work that could invite rejection. If the world of fiction had something like the film-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Kaho would not be the sort of novel to receive a unanimously high score; it would sharply divide opinion. Yet, on reflection, this has always been the fate of Murakami’s work. Cultural gatekeepers such as The New Yorker and The New York Times have valued his fiction for many years, despite controversies, perhaps because they sense that something undeniably present in the Haruki Murakami works remains beyond complete explanation, and yet so enticing, and potentially very revealing, even uplifting.
While reading Kaho, I was struck by something else, and it surprised me: the novel’s deep connection with Japanese culture. I have recently been reading Don Quixote, a work that depicts the relationship between reality and fiction with extraordinary dramatic intensity. I have also read One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Anna Karenina in the course of a few months. After immersing myself in what is generally called the canon of world literature, I turned to Murakami’s new novel and felt, with unexpected force, the presence of “Japan.”
We living in the land of the rising sun tend to think of Haruki Murakami not as a particularly Japanese writer, but as a writer with the air of literature in translation—a writer of world literature. It therefore felt slightly strange to experience Japan so strongly through his work. Among the responses to Kaho, some readers have said that it resembles a light novel or a manga, in the contexts of either praise or disparagement. Yet the observation may accurately capture the fact that the novel is propelled less by an ultimate insight into human nature, or by a destination at which criticism can comfortably arrive, than by the magnetic force of its characters and premises.
Japan is home to innumerable yōkai, the supernatural beings of the Hyakki Yagyō, the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. The manga artist Shigeru Mizuki portrayed that world in all its richness, but each individual yōkai need not be reduced to some particular aspect of human nature. In a culture of yaoyorozu no kami, the eight million gods who inhabit the myriad phenomena of the world, each being need not be assigned a clear meaning, in the sense that a deity represents this essential truth about humanity. In Western culture, figures and symbols such as the Virgin Mary, Christ, and the Cross readily invite essential interpretations of humanity and salvation. In Japanese culture, by contrast, a profusion of characters may appear in full bloom, and each may be allowed simply to exist without settling into a symbolic function. Pokémon is a contemporary example.
Such a celebration of diverse characters allows for immense creative freedom: the freedom not to fix meaning in a single place, and to let something remain capable of being anything. At the same time, there is a danger in the very permissiveness of “anything goes.” Such works are difficult to connect with ethics or an essential account of humanity, and the ground beneath criticism begins to shift. Expressions of this kind are often undervalued within orthodox traditions of artistic and cultural criticism. Even now that the word subculture is heard less often than it once was, Japanese forms of expression are still frequently relegated to the margins, perhaps because they are difficult to place within an essentialist and humanist lineage of “great art.”
The curator Kenjirō Hosaka once said to me personally that the paintings of Francis Bacon possess the “Grand Manner.” By this he meant that Bacon’s work belongs to a lineage of art that touches the core of human existence and the urgent questions of the soul. Some Japanese works, such as The Tale of Genji and the novels of Natsume Sōseki, are readily valued within the genealogy of the Western canon. Yet, as illustrated by a list of major works of world literature compiled by the British newspaper The Guardian published recently that included no Japanese works at all, Japanese literature seems to contain a structure that makes it difficult to connect with the world’s “orthodox literature”—even when we consider writers such as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburō Ōe. To varying degrees, the distinctively Japanese modes of expression also seem to have been inherited by the contemporary women writers whose names are mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize.
Reading Kaho, I began to feel that Murakami may have moved surprisingly close to this deep stratum of Japanese culture. I do not know whether the novelist is conscious of it. Nor do I know whether he would welcome such a reading if it ever reached his ears. Even so, Murakami’s work touches one of the central qualities of Japanese culture: its refusal to settle easily into essentialism or anthropocentrism, and its resistance to any simple connection with the canon of world literature or an orthodox conception of the literary. Haruki Murakami, who appears so thoroughly a writer of world literature, may in fact stand in a profoundly Japanese place. Kaho made me see this anew.
In the end, I still have no definite answer to the question of valuing Kaho. Is Kaho a failed novel—one that fails to portray generic human truths, let alone women, lacking realism? Or is it a masterpiece by an exceptionally original writer, rare even in the history of world literature, who is working with the deep dynamics of a conceptual world? Could Kaho become for Haruki Murakami what The Old Man and the Sea was for Hemingway, if not immediately, perhaps gradually as time goes by? A work can grow in the minds of its readers, and when translated and read all over the world it may reveal a different contour. For now the question remains open. I would like to continue thinking about Kaho as I live my life here in Tokyo and go about my own businesses of the everyday.
13th July 2026
Ken Mogi
kenmogi2005qualia@gmail.com
