During adolescence, this self-doubting and slightly nerdy drifter, cast from a familiar Murakami mould, formed part of an "orderly and harmonious community" of five close friends in the affluent suburbs of Nagoya. Tsukuru's rock-bottom self-esteem stems in large part from a traumatic episode in his second year at university. They fidget, shuffle, cough and turn away. Exhilarated by his ability to decode this "enormous sea of ciphers", he finds that no one in the audience cares. Although a civil engineer who designs railway stations, Tsukuru dreams that he is sight-reading a complicated piano sonata. Then, at the novel's climax, Tsukuru Tazaki himself has one of the enigmatic but revealing dreams that add to the story's texture and flavour as much as any twist of plot. He tells a ghostly tale about embracing death and plays Thelonious Monk's "Around Midnight" with fingers that ripple across the keys "like fish swimming in clear water". At a pivotal moment, we meet a mysterious jazz virtuoso in a forest hideaway. The Murakami music does not stop with Liszt. Franz Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage, his pianistic "memoir" of youthful search and struggle, accompanies the action and reflection of this book in the form of two favoured recordings, by Lazar Berman and Alfred Brendel.
On one level, his latest novel – at 300 pages, a mere bagatelle next to the three-movement, 1,000-page symphony of 1Q84 – honours and interprets one cornerstone of the Romantic piano repertoire. Haruki Murakami, who ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before he turned to fiction, often makes music a key to unlock his world.
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