Harvill Secker £16.99 pp352

“I’m not trying to make some profound statement here, but I would venture to say this: That’s life.” Haruki Murakami’s fictional world is extraordinary, but within the indisputable and beguiling weirdness that lurks below the casual-seeming surface, there is often a core that is disappointingly commonplace or even banal. Twenty-six stories are drawn from a quarter century of work. The author says that writing them is like “planting a garden” rather than (as with his novels) “planting a forest”. But miniature exotic growths don’t always survive transplantation.

The Japanese settings present few difficulties for English readers. There are no tea ceremonies, but plenty of Cokes and hamburgers. The soundtrack to the stories isn’t samisen music, but Mahler, Debussy, Dylan, the Doors and jazz numbers, both classic and obscure. Writers such as Carver and Kafka, Borges and Salinger provide models (sometimes too palpable) for what goes on in the narrative. We begin a bus journey, sit in a college dorm, call on an old friend or visit a resort. Then something strange and insubstantial emerges from what seems mundane.

In a zoo at 3am, someone senses “this invisible thing on a rampage in the dark”. A night watchman sees a reflection that “wasn’t me” and realises “this other figure loathed me”. A writer discusses how he’d like to do a story about a poor aunt (“every wedding reception has a poor aunt”) and then finds he has one stuck to his back, although she looks to other people like a cancerous dog or an old teacher. Characters behave with sudden capricious nonchalance, falling in love with strangers or taking off for Greece. Contingency becomes a narrative principle. This can lead to moments of beautiful insight, but it can also become something like self-indulgent doodling.

Many stories concern the precariousness of memory and identity. One narrator realises that “the real me” is dead and is being eaten by cats that “licked the soft folds of my mind”. An illustrator’s wife dies, leaving him only with recollections that are “the shadow of a shadow of a shadow”. Men have sex with women who remain hidden behind a veil of oddity and arbitrary silence; people have a more intense relationship with a stone, the wind or a dream than with other humans. The author brings them into being by sudden imaginative fiat (they often materialise to offer their own testimony within someone else’s tale) but this god-like gift carries responsibilities that he doesn’t always fulfil.

His similes are often charming and effective. Drink cans in a pond look like “the sunken ruins of an ancient lost city”, though there is one word too many here. Others, however, promise more than they perform. A trusting cousin’s awkwardness is “like the sound of rain heard long ago”, a kangaroo resembles “a composer whose talent has run dry” and a woman’s eyes are like “flat, suggestive moons that shimmered at the single cry of a bird at dawn”. These seem to create a poetic mood, but the image fails to hold and the feeling vanishes. The writing is rather too much in love with itself.

Too many stories use loneliness as a predictable plot device rather than a discovery about feeling. Characters have off-the-peg existential crises, resulting in sweating and vomiting for men, and silent tears and shoulder-shaking sobs for women. Studied casualness ends in moral exhortation: “people can never be anything but themselves” or “what matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely” . We travel a long way for such ingratiating but uninspired sentiments.

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