Hundreds clapped and cheered as they gathered to purchase the book at a shop in the central
"It is the first long book in six years. I am a fan of Murakami and personally anticipated it and I trust that many other fans would too. We expect a good sales day,"
The over 600 page novel, coming after Murakami's 2017 novel Killing Commendatore, is the author's first book to have simultaneous print and digital publishing.
There was already a small group of people lining up to buy the book at
Back in 1980, Murakami published a story in a literary magazine with the same title as the new book but labeled it a failure because it was in a "half-baked state," according to his interviews with local media.
The new novel complements the original story by dividing it into three parts.
The first, told from a first-person point of view, is about the protagonist's arrival in a walled city to find his true self.
The protagonist then returns to the real world in the second part and becomes a library director in a small town in Fukushima in northeastern
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Some 300,000 copies of the first edition will be printed, the
Born in
Murakami's works have been translated into more than 50 languages and earned several awards, including Noma, Tanizaki,
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