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.
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