Haruki Murakami · 2017 · road

Haruki Murakami's 2017 novel. A portrait painter whose wife has left him drives north for weeks with no destination, then settles alone in a famous artist's empty house above Odawara - where he finds a painting in the attic that nobody was meant to see, and a stone chamber in the woods with a bell that rings itself.

1. 1
   Tokyo

   The narrator paints portraits to order and has stopped minding that he is good at it. His wife of six years tells him she is seeing someone else, and he puts a few things in the car and leaves the same day.

2. 2
   Niigata

   He drives with no destination and no plan, up the Sea of Japan coast, staying in business hotels and cheap inns and sketching strangers he meets. The trip has no purpose beyond not being at home.

3. 3
   The Sanriku coast

   Across to the Pacific side and north along the Sanriku coast - towns Murakami drove himself, set before the 2011 tsunami, so the reader knows what is coming to them and the narrator does not.

4. 4
   Hokkaido

   In Hokkaido a middle-aged man with a white Subaru Forester watches him in a roadside restaurant, says almost nothing, and stays in his mind for the rest of the book. Then the car gives out and the driving ends.

5. 5
   Odawara

   A friend from art school lends him his father's empty house on a mountainside above Odawara. In the attic is a wrapped painting nobody has seen, and in the woods behind, under a cairn, a stone chamber with a bell in it.

6. 6
   Vienna

   Tomohiko Amada studied here in the late 1930s and was caught in a plot to kill a Nazi official. It failed, his family's money got him home, and he painted the thing once in ancient dress and hid it in an attic.

7. 7
   Tokyo

   The chamber, the Commendatore and the girl in the mountains are all left behind - and what the narrator carries back is a marriage he did not expect to resume and a child whose arithmetic does not quite work.