First Look: Murakami's Kaho — The Tale of KAHO

Kieran Maynard · June 2026

Shinchosha has posted a free trial chapter (試し読み) of Murakami Haruki's new novel Kaho — The Tale of KAHO (夏帆─The Tale of KAHO─), out July 3, 2026. It is Murakami's sixteenth novel and his first in three years, since The City and Its Uncertain Walls (街とその不確かな壁, 2023), and it is billed as the first of his novels to carry a woman as its sole protagonist. The book grew out of the "Kaho" sequence serialized in the magazine Shinchō between June 2024 and March 2026, revised and expanded for the volume.

What follows is my own summary of the opening chapter and some first impressions — not a translation. The chapter itself is Shinchosha's to share; I've linked their official preview at the bottom, and I'd encourage you to read it (and buy the book) there.

What happens in Chapter 1

The first chapter, "Kaho and the Motorcycle Man" (夏帆とモーターサイクルの男), opens at a restaurant, mid-encounter. A man Kaho has just met tells her, plainly and without cruelty in his voice, that she is the plainest-looking woman he has ever come across. It is the kind of line that should end an evening; instead it snags her. The insult is delivered so matter-of-factly, so free of the usual social padding, that Kaho finds herself curious about the man rather than wounded by him.

From there Murakami pulls back into exposition. We learn that Kaho has spent her whole life more or less indifferent to her own looks — an indifference that set her apart from the friends and classmates who organized so much of their attention around being seen. The narration lingers on this: not vanity and not self-deprecation, but a genuine absence of the question. The scene at the restaurant matters precisely because the man has named, out loud, the one subject she had always managed to walk past.

We also learn how the meeting came about. Kaho's editor, Machida, arranged the introduction — a blind date of sorts — as a way of nudging her along after a recent breakup. The chapter closes on a phone call between the two of them afterward, Machida fishing for a verdict on how it went, Kaho circling the odd gravity of this man she cannot quite categorize.

First impressions

Even in a few pages the setup is recognizably Murakami: an ordinary social situation tilted a few degrees off true, an encounter that works less like a meet-cute than like a small fracture through which the character's interior starts to show. The "ugliness" gambit is doing a lot of quiet work — it is a provocation aimed at the reader as much as at Kaho, daring us to decide whether the man is honest, rude, or something stranger, and using our uncertainty to make us lean in.

What's new is the angle of attention. Murakami's narrators have long been men who observe women with a certain detached fascination; here the observing consciousness is Kaho's own. The chapter spends its energy not on how she looks to others but on how little that has ever mattered to her — and on what it does to a person to have that indifference suddenly named by a stranger. Whether the "motorcycle man" turns out to be a genuine love interest, a catalyst, or one of Murakami's emissaries from somewhere less explicable, the first chapter is built to make you want to find out.

I'll likely write more once I've read the whole novel. For now: a strong, characteristically off-kilter opening, and a premise — a woman who has never cared how she looks, told by a stranger that she is plain — that is doing more than it first appears.

Read the original

Kaho — The Tale of KAHO © Murakami Haruki / Shinchosha. This page is original commentary and a plot summary; it does not reproduce or translate the text of the novel.