At his worst, his books can feel like being told an especially dull dream. At its best ( The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), Murakami's writing feels incantatory, his plotting mesmeric. His fiction is characterized by deadpan prose and somnambulistic protagonists, usually youngish shut-ins dazed by the real world – even before portals to other dimensions rupture it. Murakami's fans, the most ardent of whom call themselves "Harukists," consume his books as devotedly as he produces them. But there's always been something industrial about Haruki Murakami – author of 24 books, translator of nearly 50 others – and his work. One might sooner expect such consumerist mania to surround the latest iteration of the iPhone than a new title from an author in contention for the Nobel Prize. It stands to move impressive numbers upon its release in North America, having already topped bestseller lists in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. When Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage was released in Japan on April 12, 2013, bookstores opened at midnight to round-the-block lineups and the novel sold a million copies in its first week.
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