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A few months ago, Haruki Murakami released his fifteenth novel. Unfortunately, it is only available in Japanese for now, but it should be published in English and other languages in 2024. This book was released with little advanced warning and it was a surprise also because it was an expansion of a short story he wrote many decades ago.

Perhaps this should not have been a big surprise, for Murakami has frequently revisited old short stories and novels to create new novels. It’s something he’s done throughout much of his career, in fact, and in this article I’ll point out a few examples.

After the success of his Rat Trilogy, Murakami wrote a radically new book called Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was a magnificent work that won its other the prestigious Tanizaki Prize in 1985.

However, the book was not entirely new. It was an expansion of a short story called “The Town/City and its Uncertain Walls” that Murakami had published in 1980 in the literary journal Bungakukai.

Murakami was deeply unhappy with his short story and it is one of the few things that he truly regretted publishing. “I regret putting [it] into print,” he later said. “I shouldn’t have published it.” His early books were all efforts at dealing with his own psychological traumas but he was good at veiling these behind cryptic symbols. In this story, though, he revealed too much and regretted exposing his interior life.

Still, the idea for the story was a good one and he felt he needed to do something better with it, so he rewrote it and then added a second narrative inspired by American detective fiction, specifically the works of Raymond Chandler.

This novel is different from everything Murakami wrote before or after it. Most importantly, it is a primarily realist novel, devoid of the usual magical realist elements that mark his fiction.

Whilst it is different from his other works, it is similar in that Murakami revisited an old short story in order to expand it. This was the story “Firefly,” which appears in his collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

The short story features a protagonist in a university dormitory and his stuttering roommate. This was the premise of the novel that was published four years later. Although the short story is just a loose basis for the novel, there are major similarities, including the protagonist watching the Japanese flag being raised and feeling confusion over the necessity for such a ritual.

It is noteworthy that the short story has a nameless protagonist but the novel does not. Norwegian Wood was the first of Murakami’s books to have its protagonist named (Toru Watanabe) and everything he wrote prior merely used the first-person pronoun boku.

In 1986, Murakami wrote a short story called “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women.” Almost a decade later, this became his magnum opus, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a vast and sprawling book that marked a major turning point in the author’s career.

Interestingly, the short story is extremely similar to an early chapter in the novel. Murakami has made only a few small changes. (For example, he changed the name of a poet.) The chapter in question is one of Murakami’s most famous scenes – Toru Okada listens to classical music whilst making spaghetti. It is almost a cliché now, often used to parody the author.

It is also interesting that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and South of the Border, West of the Sun were originally the same story. Although they seem completely different, Murakami began them as the same project and then spun them off into vastly different novels. This further illustrates his creative process and specifically his ability to turn an idea into multiple stories.

Murakami’s ninth novel took its inspiration from yet another short story. This time, it was a piece called “Man-eating Cats.” The novel is about a man who goes to Greece in search of a woman he loves who has disappeared. This is not exactly the same as the story, which is about a couple who escape to Greece after having an affair. Still, it appears to be the basis of the novel.

Incidentally, the woman is called Izumi, which was the name of a character in South of the Border, West of the Sun, a novel written when Murakami was working on “Man-eating Cats.”  In fact, the idea of this affair also appears tied to that novel, so perhaps the short story could be said to have influenced two novels.

At around 1,200 pages (in English), 1Q84 is Murakami’s longest novel but did you know that it was based upon one of his shortest short stories?

The story of Tengo and Aomame is a massive expansion of “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” an achingly beautiful story from 1981.

Essentially, the story suggests that when a young man sees the most beautiful (but of course not conventionally beautiful) girl he’s ever seen, perhaps it is because they had been lovers long ago and had both suffered amnesia. They see each other and feel a strange sense of love and desire, but do not recognise the other as their partner.

This was expanded to have Tengo and Aomame lose each other and embark upon improbably complex and possibly multi-dimensional journeys to find each other again.

And now we come full circle.

I previously explained how a short story that could be called either “The Town and Its Uncertain Walls” or “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” had been turned into Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but in fact Murakami has revisited that short story again to turn it into another full novel.

The short story was certainly the inspiration for one of the dual threads in the earlier novel but it appears to be the entirety of this new novel. I have not yet read it, but it is no secret that this is a novel-length rewrite.

The novel contains an afterword, in which Murakami notes “I wasn’t satisfied with the story, so I didn’t collect it into book form.” Well, now he has. It has been many decades since the original, but as we have seen, Murakami is no stranger to reaching back into the past for ideas.

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