Dan Simmons The Terror is amazing and fits quite well.

It is based on a true historical event. Victorian era explorers were trying to find the Northwest Passage (a channel that would let them cross the Americas) but they get stuck in the ice and things go very badly.

It’s horror but with a heavy dose of historical fiction. Very atmospheric. It’ll make you feel a chill on a hot summer’s day.

Funny things is, Murakami is seen as a not-very-Japanese writer, too. (Even though he is Japanese, of course.)

I’m reading it at the moment. I’m about halfway through and I don’t know what the hell is going on hahaha.

I suspect the last line is going to be: And then I woke up after a particularly long and intense dream, retrieved my schedule from my bag, and began my visit.

Something to consider is that the number of words he submitted may not have been the number published. Perhaps editors were regularly cutting 10k-20k from his books. If they did regularly cut chunks, they may have wanted 100k so that they would end up with at least 75k to publish after editing.

His style is often quite rambling (in a lovely way!). Perhaps it was even more rambling and slightly less lovely when his works were originally submitted to be edited. (Or maybe the editors butchered out tens of thousands of awesome words haha.)

Dunno if that’s what happened, but it’s a very realistic hypothesis.