The forbidden worlds of Haruki Murakami

Abstract

Having established himself as an authority on the work of Haruki Murakami in Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: A Reader's Guide (2002) and Dances with Sheep (2002), Matthew Strecher turns his attention in The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami (2014) to the metaphysical world which recurs in many of Murakami’s novels. Most commonly written by Murakami as “over there”, the metaphysical world is shown to represent the inner identity of his protagonists and is examined in a range of stories, including his newest novel at the time, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.