​The detective story has always been a game played between the author and the reader. It creates a world where logic, reason and process lead inevitably to motives, solutions, and the perpetrator. In a world that has become more and more complex, the traditional detective story reassures readers with logical plots that have the ability to “deliver us from evil and lead us toward the broad daylight of understanding [and] towards a restoration of the social order that the crime had so violently disturbed” (Bertens 196). The genre is also attractive to the writer as it provides a pattern to follow, a well-worn template that offers identifiable tropes as well as scope for invention and creative interpretation. For Murakami, it was a window into another culture, another way of life.