Novelist Murakami's take on nationalism, miltarism and Japanese history unfolds in modern-day Tokyo, Murakami's usual element. As in his other novels, the city is hip, frenetic and westernized -- this book opens with its protagonist cooking spaghetti -- but in this book Tokyo is also a place with a past. The narrator discovers how much of a past when he meets a former imperial soldier who witnessed untellable atrocities during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. We say "untellable," but this is not a book for the squeamish. It is an unstinting, weighty book by a major modern novelist.  (JPN107, $15.95)