Harvill £12.99 pp436

This is an odd book, which is probably just as well. A Haruki Murakami novel that wasn’t odd would be like, say, a Frederick Forsyth novel about a Victorian parson struggling with loss of faith in the light of Darwinism: a bit difficult to market. Murakami’s brand of oddity has served him well and made him the only Japanese novelist to achieve real popularity in the West, far outstripping Yukio Mishima or Shusaku Endo. Perhaps people find something reassuringly familiar in him: namely, apart from all his western cultural references, that hardy international standby, magic realism. He is less twee than some magic realists, though, and in certain ways compares with Thomas Pynchon.

The 15-year-old hero of Kafka on the Shore is not really called Kafka; he decides to go by that name when he runs away from home, a smart house in Tokyo where he lives with his disagreeable father, a world-renowned sculptor. He used to have a mother and a sister as well, but they left so long ago he hardly remembers them. He takes a long-distance bus to Takamatsu, reasoning that as he has no connection with the place nobody will find him there.

No Murakami hero can go more than half a block without running into some sexy girl, and on the bus he meets Sakura, who asks to sit next to him, falls asleep on his shoulder and insists on giving him her cellphone number. A slight complication is that he suspects she might be his long-lost sister. His plan has always been to “journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library ”. In Takamatsu he discovers the perfect library, endowed by a family of sake distillers. The assistant librarian, Oshima, takes a shine to him and not only gives him a job but lets him live in one of the back rooms. Meanwhile, an elderly, brain- damaged man called Nakata, something of a holy fool, is also travelling from Tokyo. To mark the distinction between their worlds, Kafka’s chapters are first-person and present tense, Nakata’s are third-person and past tense. Although the two never meet, Nakata helps Kafka fulfil his psychic destiny.

This seems to revolve around the Oedipus legend, although a great deal is left unexplained; Murakami wants to avoid any pat resolution. Early on, Kafka and Oshima discuss Natsume Soseki’s novel The Miner, which, Oshima says, is rather different from “your typical modern bildungsroman” because the hero is unchanged by his experiences. Kafka says that’s why he likes it, he finds it true to life: people do not go around making great formative choices that lead them to maturity, they just “watch things happen and accept it all”.

There seems a contradiction here, since Kafka makes the classic storybook choice to run away, and at the end is sadder and wiser and “part of a brand-new world”. But then people really are both active and passive, so Murakami manages to have it both ways.

There’s an element of “kids’ stuff for grown-ups” in all this, of course, but Murakami is a popular artist rather than a hack; his novel is a disciplined mix of the thriller, the fantasy genre and the literary novel, and it carries a certain peculiar conviction. Yet again he has created a tale that you can steam through surprisingly quickly, but are likely to remember and puzzle over for a long time.

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