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Shiro also has “strangely eloquent” calves and likes to play Liszt’s “Le Mal du Pays,” meaning “Homesickness,” which floats through this book just as Janacek’s “Sinfonietta” did through Murakami’s previous book, the phantasmagorical doorstop “IQ84.”

That's the purpose of the Liszt piece, which recurs like a motif, even giving the novel its title: "Le mal du pays" is part of a suite called "Years of Pilgrimage."

Kindled by the melancholy strains of “Le Mal du Pays,” he revisits his pain without turning his thoughts immediately toward death.

We are given a soundtrack: Liszt’s “Le Mal du Pays,” from “Years of Pilgrimage.”

While allowing that notions of homesickness, the German word heimweh and the French mal du pays all went some way to defining what was in fact, a disease, Hofer argued that a medical name, an agreed set of symptoms and effective treatments were required.