of surreal fantasy and urban realism which seamlessly blends together dream, memory and reality against the backdrop of everyday life in Japan. Cats talk to humans and twin moons appear in the sky, while at the same time, people cook pasta and worry about missed phone calls. The banal frequently meets the otherworldly, questioning conventional notions of reality.

To celebrate the release of the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, I decided to go on a pilgrimage of my own. Over a month’s worth of weekends I explored some of the places in Tokyo that have crossed over from fact to fiction and back again throughout the pages of his surreal novels in the last 35 years.

In Part 1 weabsentmindedly playing with his phone, and a young woman nervously fiddling with her hair. With food as bland as the vinyl and wood-veneer furniture you sit on, this isn’t a place you come for the ambiance or a fine dining experience but to kill time, or perhaps escape it…

It was here where Mari, while minding her own business, is interrupted by an old acquaintance Takahashi in After Dark (2007). Like with many of Murakami’s narratives, this chance encounter pulls her into a series of unusual events in which the rational logic of Tokyo’s daylight hours does not apply at night.

Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but grew up in postwar Kobe where both of his parents taught Japanese literature. During his childhood he was heavily influenced Western