Murakami’s 15th novel retreads a form of magical realism that hasn’t evolved

There is something inescapably adolescent about the novels of Haruki Murakami. This is most obvious, perhaps, in his multimillion-selling Norwegian Wood, with its angst and melancholy. But it’s also there in the rest of his writing, whether in the mooning after lost loves (see 1Q84, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun) or the dreamlike, pseudo-spiritualism of novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. “Tell a dream, lose a reader,” Henry James said, and he wasn’t wrong.

The problem with Murakami’s dreamscapes are that they are so entirely unmoored from reality that nothing seems to matter; meaning is endlessly deferred. It feels as if his work, with its talking cats, mystical landscapes and drifting, nameless, middle-aged protagonists obsessed with their teenage years, has never moved on from a form of magical realism that was just about bearable in his short early novels. His books have not evolved – they have just got longer.