![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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