When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in 2004, the questions weren’t always characterised by their pithiness. Many of his novels, the interviewer suggested at one point, are

variations on a theme: a man has been abandoned by, or has otherwise lost, the object of his desire, and is drawn by his inability to forget her into a parallel world that seems to offer the possibility of regaining what he has lost, a possibility that life, as he (and the reader) knows it, can never offer.