Haruki Murakami’s next novel, The Tale of KAHO, will be published on July 3rd by Shinchosha Publishing Co, the AP reports.
This will be Murakami’s first full-length novel since 2023’s The City and its Uncertain Walls (published in the US in 2024). According to the publisher, “Kaho is the first lone, woman protagonist featured in a full-length novel by Murakami”—a fact that’s particularly notable given feminist critiques of his oeuvre, as well as his own commentary.
The Tale of KAHO, which follows a 26-year-old picture book author “finding a way out of a bizarre world,” is based on four short stories originally published in Japan’s Shinchō magazine, the final one just this past March.
As usual, English readers will have to wait—there has been no announced publication date for the English translation (a famously rigorous process)—but never fear: in the meantime, you can read the first short story from the aforementioned cycle, “Kaho,” which was translated by Philip Gabriel and published in The New Yorker in 2024. And there will be a new Murakami book to buy in the US this summer: Abandoning a Cat: A Personal Story, an 80-page personal essay, also originally published in The New Yorker and translated by Gabriel.