How Haruki Murakami came to write his first woman-led novel, The Tale of Kaho

After a serious (undisclosed) illness in early 2025 that hospitalised him and caused him to lose roughly 40 pounds, Murakami (77), who is health conscious and maintains a strict daily regimen including running daily, described the writing process as a kind of “resurrection.” He has come back stronger, with a story that feels different; it’s more optimistic perhaps, and still laced with the surreal elements that have defined his writing. For decades, he has enchanted readers with all things Murakamiesque: lonely protagonists, talking cats, jazz records playing in the background, wells leading to parallel worlds, and the thin veil between the ordinary and the uncanny. His men (nameless narrators, jazz-loving detectives, or middle-aged searchers) drift through Tokyo’s neon nights or rural wells into metaphysical realms.

The genesis of the novel

In his novels and short stories, women often appear as enigmatic and inscrutable muses, fragments of memory, or erotic catalysts. But The Tale of Kaho breaks new ground: it centres on a female protagonist for the first time in one of his major novels. Kaho is a 26-year-old picture-book author who attempts to figure her way out of a bizarre world; a world of strange happenstances, which he builds imaginatively, filling it with his signature unease and sense of foreboding.

The novel expands upon Murakami’s 2024 short story “Kaho,” which was published in Japanese literary magazine Shincho; the English version, translated by Philip Gabriel, was published in The New Yorker in the same year. He reportedly rehearsed the story at a book reading event two years ago at Waseda University, his alma mater in Tokyo, with another well-known Japanese writer, Mieko Kawakami (Heaven, All the Lovers in the Night, Breasts and Eggs, Sisters in Yellow), who happens to be an admirer of his work.

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After “Kaho”, Murakami has published three stories in the series in Shincho, most recently in the March 2026 edition: “The Anteater of Musashi-sakai,” “Kaho and the Termite Queen” and “Kaho and the Motorcycle Man, and Scarlett Johansson.” The novel will bring all four parts together, the publisher said.

The mystery of Kaho’s ‘ugliness’

In “Kaho,” on what seems like an ordinary blind date, a man named Sahara looks at Kaho and says, with a gentle, almost friendly smile: “I’ve dared all kinds of women in my life, but I have to say I’ve never seen one as ugly as you.” Kaho is neither strikingly beautiful nor particularly clever. She is “just a little curious.” Instead of anger or tears, she feels genuine surprise. “What on earth is this man trying to tell us? I must find the way out of this world,” a brief promotional teaser released by the publisher quotes Kaho as saying.

The same blunt insult lands after dessert on a pleasant dinner. Kaho, a children’s book writer, processes the remark with detached self-observation rather than fury. Later, she dreams of the deep sea. She writes a new picture book about a girl whose face is stolen while she sleeps. The girl embarks on a quest to recover it, but she cannot remember what her own face looked like: beautiful or ugly, round or thin. No one around her can (or will) describe it. The story-within-the-story carries classic Murakami motifs: loss of identity, the unreliability of memory, and the heroism of solitary journeys.

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Readers familiar with Murakami will recognise some recurring threads common to most of his novels: strange names (Sahara, for instance, which evokes vast emptiness), abrupt intrusions of the bizarre into everyday life, and protagonists who respond to life’s absurdity with introspective calm rather than panic. A young female lead promises fresh terrain and Kaho’s curiosity is in sharp contrast with the passive drift of many earlier Murakami heroes — brooding, detached, adrift: Kafka Tamura (Kafka on the Shore), Toru Watanabe (Norwegian Wood), Toru Okada (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), Tsukuru Tazaki (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) and Tengo Kawana (1Q84). If Okada digs a well or Tamura runs away to unravel fate, Kaho might chase the mystery of her own “ugliness” or stolen face through dream logic, parallel realities, or the hidden corners of Tokyo’s publishing world.

The line between creator and creation

When Kaho returns to her modest apartment after the blind date, the man’s words stay with her as a riddle. She sketches pictures for children’s books by day: simple, whimsical tales that mask deeper longings. At night, the world tilts. Perhaps a cat speaks to her, or a well appears in an alley that leads to an underwater library. Friends and colleagues offer her cryptic advice. An editor named Machida (mentioned in the short story) might reappear as a guide or obstacle. Strange coincidences pile up: books that rewrite themselves, mirrors that show alternate faces, phone calls from people who claim to know the “real” Kaho from another life.

Murakami has always probed alienation and the search for authentic connection. For a young woman in contemporary Japan, social pressures around beauty, marriage, and professional success are tremendous and the author must have tapped this. Kaho’s lack of exceptional looks or intellect becomes her strength. Her curiosity drives her forward where others might retreat into resentment or conformity. The man’s insult, delivered with eerie politeness, forces Kaho to question not just her appearance but her entire sense of self. Who decides what is ugly or plain?

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Murakami’s women have evolved across his oeuvre, from the sensual: if they are elusive figures in Norwegian Wood, they are fierce and independent in 1Q84 or Killing Commendatore. However, he has hitherto not written any full-length novels narrated primarily through a woman’s consciousness. By expanding “Kaho,” Murakami seems to hand the reins to a younger, more grounded female voice. Picture-book creation itself becomes meta: Kaho writes stories for children while her own life turns into a surreal fable. The line between creator and creation blurs; that, by the way, is another favourite Murakami device. Does she write the dream, or does the dream rewrite her?

The ordinary and the uncanny

Since most Murakami novels have been doorstoppers in recent years, with some running into 1,000 pages, The Tale of Kaho at 352 pages seems modest in thickness. He wrote much of it after his health scare, and seems to have infused it with a sense of reclaimed vitality. Most of his previous novels are like half-remembered dreams, inviting readers to fill the gaps with their own loneliness, desires, and questions. The Tale of Kaho seems poised to do the same, but with a fresh perspective. A young woman who draws pictures for children suddenly finds her world redrawn by an insult that opens doors to the unknown.

Murakami’s magic lies in the fact that he makes the mundane profound and the profound strangely ordinary. With Kaho at the centre, he may be exploring how we all lose pieces of ourselves (faces, identities and certainties) and the strange, winding paths we take to reclaim them. As July approaches, readers in Japan will queue for The Tale of Kaho; those in the rest of the world might have to wait another year.

What’s set the chatter among his loyal readers is the new protagonist whose curiosity perhaps mirrors our own: a woman who, when told she is ugly, doesn’t flinch or fight but wonders, and then steps into the strangeness. Murakami returns with a resurrection tale that feels both familiar and newly alive. In The Tale of Kaho, we will see the ordinary come face to face with the impossible, and a picture-book author might just redraw the boundaries of what it means to see, and be seen.