(Tokyo) Famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami will publish a new novel in Japan on April 13, his first in six years, his Japanese publishing house Shinchosha announced on Wednesday, without revealing its title or subject.
Asked by AFP, Shinchosha was also unable to say immediately when translated versions of the novel will appear.
The publisher was content to specify that the Japanese manuscript represented 1200 pages, without specifying the number of pages that the book will have once printed.
74-year-old Haruki Murakami has been consistently considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for years.
Translated into fifty languages, his work alternately disenchanted, fantastic, absurd or realistic spans four decades and includes ten novels as well as short stories and essays.
Among his best-known novels are Spring Bird Chronicles (1994), Kafka on the shore (2002) or even 1Q84 (2009).
His news drive my car was adapted to the cinema and the film won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2022.
His latest novel, The Commander’s Murderwas released in 2017 in Japan.
Although his works are extremely popular both in his native country and abroad, Haruki Murakami shuns fame and rarely appears in public.
Apart from a regular radio program in Japan, which he hosts, he says little about world affairs outside of his books, “because it requires thought and a precise choice of words”, according to him.
A library dedicated to the writer, collecting his manuscripts and his discography, was inaugurated in 2021 on the campus of Waseda University in Tokyo.