Prateek Tanmay
4 min readJul 3, 2026 10:41 PM IST
Those who have been eagerly waiting for the next Haruki Murakami novel will be pleased to know that his book The Tale of KAHO became available across bookstores in Japan on Friday. Unfortunately, an English translation is not yet available, and no announcement has been made by his publishers about when the English-speaking world would be able to get its hands on it.
His latest stands out in Murakami’s oeuvre as it departs from tradition in that rather than feature a lonely male protagonist, the novel features a female protagonist—a first for him.
A Japan bookstore arranged a midnight countdown so that his fans could purchase the book as soon as the embargo was lifted. Naoyuki Yamano, the first customer to buy the new Murakami novel at the bookstore told the Associated Press, “I’m excited about finding out how the story evolves around a female main character.”
Murakami put himself in his heroine’s shoes
Murakami described the book’s heroine, Kaho, as an ordinary young picture-book author whose life is upended by strange occurrences. He asserted that he wrote the novel by imagining himself in her position.
The novel grew out of a short story Murakami first read aloud two years ago at a Waseda University event alongside fellow author Mieko Kawakami. That original story ran in Shincho magazine in June 2024 and an English translation appeared in The New Yorker on July 1, 2024. Murakami followed it with three more Kaho installments, the last appearing this past March. The finished novel stitches all four into one book, spanning 352 pages across four chapters: “Kaho and the Motorcycle Man,” “The Anteater of Musashi-sakai,” “Kaho and the Termite Queen,” and “The Guardian Angel, Elephant Egg and Scarlett Johansson.”
The first short story
The short story simply titled, Kaho that appeared in The New Yorker two years ago opens with a 26-year-old woman who is on a blind date arranged by her editor. Bizarrely, her date bluntly insults her looks, but rather than take offence, she is more curious about his utterance, and what he had meant by that. From there, her life takes a strange turn, eventually leading her to channel the experience into her own creative work. The novel’s later chapters introduce further odd encounters, including with an anteater and a jaguar.
Does it hit “Murakami Bingo”?
Longtime readers have a running gag for approaching each new Murakami release, the Murakami Bingo. The game tracks the recurring tropes, stylistic quirks, and bizarre plot devices found across Murakami’s novels, originally created by cartoonist Grant Snider, letting readers cross off familiar elements as they go. The card has circulated for more than a decade, with the original comic and an interactive version both published through The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review.
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Typical bingo squares include a jazz-loving, beer-drinking solitary male protagonist, a plot kicked off by a missing cat or a strange phone call, and surreal touches such as secret passageways, talking animals, characters slipping into alternate worlds, along with recurring odd details like a woman’s ears or specific classical-music references.
Based on what’s known so far about “The Tale of KAHO,” a few squares—if not the male protagonist—seem within reach: the anteater and jaguar could plausibly fill the “surreal creature” slot, and the character Sahara, who unnervingly seems to read Kaho’s thoughts, echoes the quasi-supernatural figure who regularly turns up in Murakami’s fiction. Whether the rest of the novel brings back familiar Murakami furniture such as wells, missing pets, obscure long-playing vinyl record references remains to be seen.
His 2023 novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a novel that blurred the line between reality and imagination, featured a young man obsessed with a woman he loved and lost in his youth.
