That’s a risky proposition, as Murakami is among the more sui generis of contemporary writers. Though it often tries to avoid the genre, Novelist as a Vocation will be read by some as a book on the craft of writing, especially by writers who aspire to be like Murakami. The character takes this in stride: “At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.” She jokes that this is a science-fiction premise, then carries on with the business of being a character in a novel. Murakami is interested in tales of doggedly normal people experiencing something extraordinary that they accept they’ll never quite understand.In the novel 1Q84, a woman caught in traffic clambers down from an overpass in order to keep an appointment this seems to knock her into a reality parallel to her own.

These plots are rarely resolved as they are in an Agatha Christie. While Murakami eventually moves on from stories about private investigators, most of his body of work involves mystery in some fashion. It begins as a novel of quest (albeit an absurd one: the search for a missing cat) but deepens emotionally and ranges widely it’s a hefty and unlikely page-turner.

With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he seemed to reach artistic maturity. His 1987 novel Norwegian Wood was a comparatively straightforward and wistful tale of young love that made him a star in Japan. His early novels were postmodern potboilers, detective stories with a philosophical bent, like 1982’s A Wild Sheep Chase and its 1988 sequel, Dance Dance Dance. Murakami is among the most prolific of contemporary novelists, and his books have traversed many styles and themes. Novelist as a Vocation, in this way, is like so many of his novels, and it hinges on a trick at which Murakami is well practiced: the promise of revelation that turns out to be a disappearing act. Murakami’s impulse is to document these lives without worrying too much about explaining them. The novelist’s protagonists are often people adrift, destabilized by something that never quite comes into focus-sometimes a psychic trauma, sometimes a paranormal force. But Novelist as a Vocation is elusive for another reason, too: Much like Murakami’s fiction, it’s a work more interested in questions than in answers. Having published 14 novels and five collections of stories in his 40-plus-year career, Murakami surely knows that whatever fiction requires of an artist can’t be distilled into steps like a recipe.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami