Part of 騎士団長殺し [Kishidancho Goroshi]
First published 2017
A 36-year-old portrait painter walks away from his marriage of six years and drives north until he runs out of reasons to keep going. He ends up in a remote studio in the mountains southwest of Tokyo, a place that belonged to a famous Japanese painter. He is not working. He is barely thinking. Then he finds a canvas hidden in the attic, a strange painting that seems to pulse with its own energy. At night, a bell rings from somewhere in the wooded hill behind the house. His neighbor, a wealthy and theatrical man, shows up with an offer of help that comes with strings attached. The painter cannot ignore any of it. He follows the sound of the bell. He looks too closely at the painting. He starts to understand that whatever drove him here, grief or fear or something he has no name for, is exactly what this place intends to use against him. Murakami builds the tension slowly, through ordinary mornings and strange nights, until the painter has no choice but to face what he has been running from.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, magical-realism, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, haunting, introspective, melancholic, mysterious, tension-building
Tropes: internal-conflict, mysterious-stranger, place-as-character, unreliable-reality
Setting: Tokyo, Japanese Mountains, Remote Studio
Period: Contemporary
507 pages · Hardcover · Atlas Contact
Content warnings: death