Tokyo (EFE).- Followers of the writer Haruki Murakami gathered today in bookstores all over Japan to buy the latest work by the well-known author, “The City and its Uncertain Walls”, the first long novel that publish in six years.
A bookstore in the central Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku opened after midnight so that the hundreds of fans gathered there could buy the book today amid applause and shouts of emotion, while other stores in the city prepared stalls at the entrance to facilitate sales.
“It is the first long novel after six years. As a fan of Murakami, I personally expected it and I trust many other fans too, so we expect a good sale today,” the head of the Japanese book section of the Maruzen bookstore chain, Kengo Tomoda, told EFE.
The novel, of more than 600 pages, comes after the publication in 2017 of “Killing Commendatore” (The death of the commander), and the first to be published simultaneously in print and electronic format.
Tomoda explained that at the time of the opening there was already a small group gathered at the doors of the store to buy the book, something that makes him happy since nowadays he considers that it is “difficult” to be able to sell novels, in addition to the growing competition with digital formats.
The successful Japanese author had already published a story with a similar title in a literary magazine in 1980 that he called “The City, and its Uncertain Walls” -he adds a comma- and that he considered a failure since it was “half-baked”, for which never had a longer journey until now, as explained in interviews with local media.
A book divided into three parts
This new book completes that original story by dividing it into three parts: the first, which is told in the first person and in which a narrator arrives in a city with high walls where his adolescent self had told him that he could find his true self.
In the second part, the protagonist returns to the real world and becomes the director of the library of a small town in Fukushima prefecture (northeast Japan), where he lives a mysterious experience.
“Haruki Murakami is very famous in the world and today as I knew that a new novel was going to come out, I came to buy it. Every time something of his comes out in bookstores, they put everything like this, for which he is very famous, ”Yukihiro Honsei, a Spanish-Japanese resident of Chiba (east of Tokyo), told EFE after buying the new book.
First edition with 300,000 copies for sale
The publisher that publishes the book in Japan, Shinchosha, has confirmed that this first edition in the Asian country has 300,000 copies, a much higher figure than usual for other novels, and goes on sale at a price of 2,970 yen (about 21 euros) in hard cover. He still does not know when it will reach the rest of the world.
Born in Kyoto (western Japan), Murakami, 74, made his literary debut with the novel “Hear the wind sing” (Listen to the wind song, 1979) and is known for works such as “Norwegian wood” (Tokyo blues , 1987), “Kafka on the shore” (Kafka on the shore, 2002) or the most recent “1Q84” (2010) and “Men without women” (Hombres sin mujeres, 2014).
His works have been translated into more than 50 languages and his career has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Noma, the Tanizaki, the Hans Christian Andersen, the Franz Kafka and the Jerusalem Prize.