After turning to the Beatles for the soundtrack to his international bestseller Norwegian Wood, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami returns to the fab four for inspiration in a new short story called Drive My Car.
Named after the first track on the 1965 Rubber Soul album the story is due to be published in the magazine Bungeishunju on 9 November, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. English language readers will have to wait until the story is translated.
Set in 1960s Tokyo when students were challenging the established order – and the Beatles were met with protests from right-wing nationalists on their tour of country in 1966 – Murakami's breakout novel captured the popular imagination in Japan when it was published in 1987. In the novel 37-year-old Toru Wantabe hears a cover of Norwegian Wood – which is also a Rubber Soul track – and is suddenly overwhelmed by feelings of loss and nostalgia.
The latest short story is subtitled Onna no Inai Otokotachi, which translates as Men Without Women.
It comes hot on the heels of another short, Samsa in Love, written by Murakami and published by the New Yorker which saw him return to Kafka as a theme in his writing. The 15-year-old runaway at the centre of Murakami's 2005 novel, Kafka on The Shore, calls himself Kafka in honour of Czech writer Franz Kafka.
Samsa in Love tells of a man who wakes one morning to discover that has transformed into Kafka's Metamorphosis protagonist, Gregor Samsa. Its opening line runs: "He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa."
Japanese bookshops were mobbed on the release of Murakami's latest novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, in April. It is expected to be published in English in 2014.
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