Haruki Murakami is riding high in the charts again, after a digital edition of his latest work that stretches to eight volumes has raced up the bestseller lists.

Featuring the Japanese writer’s thoughts on everything from jazz and cats to relationships, the book, which has just been published in Japan, collects Murakami’s answers to the queries he received online from fans earlier this year. The author had set himself up as a kind of literary agony uncle at the Murakami-san no Tokoro (Mr Murakami’s place) website: “After so long, I want to exchange emails with readers,” he said in January.

He received 37,465 queries in total, and managed to respond to 3,716 of them. Japanese publisher Shinchosa has now released a print title collecting 473 of the questions put to Murakami, as well as a digital version, featuring all 3,716, which it says is equivalent to eight volumes. According to the Asahi Shimbun, Murakami specifically requested the digital edition, which is currently in 13th place in Amazon.co.jp’s Kindle charts.

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The book sees the novelist responding to everything from whether he has ever wanted to be a cat (no), to how to stop a partner from burping, and his feelings on his perennial position as prime contender to win the Nobel prize for literature. (The latter being “kind of a nuisance.”.)

“I figured I might get as many as 10,000 questions, but it ended up being nearly four times that,” Murakami told the Japan Times in May. “I went to Jingu Stadium the other day and realised with a sigh that I’d received more questions than the number of people that can fit in the stadium … I was thinking it might be something like the Agora of Athens in ancient Greece, where everyone came together and anyone could put up their hand and say whatever they wanted to say.”

Although 1m copies of his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, were sold in a just a week in Japan, Murakami rarely appears in public, and suggested to the Japan Times that the site “might show people a different side of me”.

But his army of English-speaking fans may have to turn to Japanese dictionaries if they want to see it. Although two early short novels by the author, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, have just been released in English to much acclaim, Harvill Secker says there are “no plans at the moment” to publish Murakami-san no Tokoro in English.

