Murakami City in Niigata Prefecture, along the Sea of Japan, was once a castle town. Currently, it is showcasing "hina" dolls ...

And Haruki Murakami’s narrators—unmarried, often middle-aged men with solitary habits—continually slip into eerie ...

Through the unusual mechanics of this alternative town, its creatures and unique physics, Murakami imparts a sense of profundity which goes unaccounted for. While one could speculate about the ...

and beasts haunting the town will take readers back to Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. In the foreword, the author admits that he wrote his 1985 novel as ...

Murakami offers variations on this theme throughout ... we learn that he “found a way to get to the walled-in town (though I had no idea how).” After the boy disappears into that world ...

She chooses this moment to reveal that her real self lives in a distant town surrounded by high walls. The self there beside the boy is only her shadow. Several months later, even this shadow ...

Late in December, Louis Vuitton announced that it would be reinvigorating its collaboration with Murakami with a ‘re-edition’ collection which will be revealed in chapters throughout 2025 (a splashy ...