THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 613pp.

Harvill. Paperback, Pounds 10.99. - 1 86046 4696.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the fourth of Haruki Murakami's novels to be translated into English. The first, A Wild Sheep Chase (translated in 1990), with its story of a man uncovering a right-wing corporate conspiracy in the course of pursuing a mutant sheep across Japan, created a distinctive imaginative world and established the persona of the Murakami hero: "Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over."

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle opens with Toru Okada, "Mr. Wind-Up bird", doing what comes naturally to such people mid-morning - "boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta". Just as his pasta is becoming nicely al dente, accompanied by a suitable musical crescendo, the phone rings and a strange woman asks for ten minutes of his time, so that they can "understand each other". With this conversation begins the unravelling of a seemingly impeccably well-ordered life.

The bizarre and involved plot begins with a missing cat and extends through the break-up of Okada's marriage, a series of encounters with the psychic sisters Malta and Kreta Kano, and the increasingly supernatural confrontation between Okada and his sinister brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, economist, television pundit and budding politician. Running parallel to this is the recounting of three stories about the fighting between Russian and Japanese troops on the Chinese mainland before the Second World War. As the book unfolds, Okada becomes more and more obsessed by Lieutenant Mamiya's wartime experiences in Outer Mongolia at the hands of the savage Russian commander, Boris the Manskinner; so much so that he finds himself compelled to re-create Mamiya's imprisonment at the bottom of a well, with (needless to say) supernatural consequences.

If this sample from the sprawling plot sounds strange in summary, it is testament to the power and skill of Murakami's storytelling that such a bizarre chain of events unfolds with a plausible, if surreal, logic that leaves the reader accepting each new twist as reasonable. This is achieved in part by combining the depiction of the surreal and supernatural with a careful delineation of the more banal excesses of modern life. One moment, Okada is helping May Kasahara, his precocious teenage neighbour, to classify passing commuters according to three stages of male-pattern baldness - part of a market survey for the wig manufacturer for whom she works part-time - the next, he has been set up in business as a clairvoyant by Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka, mother and son fashion designers turned psychics. The absurdities of Murakami's fictions seem fuelled by an appreciation of the strangeness of many features of everyday life under the logic of late capitalism. As May Kasahara puts it: "But really Mr. Wind-Up bird, it's been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you're such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things."

The most impressive thing about Murakami's writing is his sustained delineation of a surreal, super-real world. Each of his books has been a variation on a set of common themes: for all their strangeness, their invention and their bizarre twists and turns, they have a compelling familiarity. Thus, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, we once again encounter a thirty-year-old (and two months) hero, bereft of ambition and abandoned by his wife; a precocious teenage-girl sidekick; a strange, supernatural hotel; a fleeting insight into the operation of sinister, sometimes super-natural, right-wing power structures; and women with unusually beautiful ears. As with the heroes of the other books, so Mr.

Wind-Up bird must face up to his loneliness and isolation: "I sat at the kitchen table as usual, drinking a beer and listening to music on the radio. It then occurred to me that I wanted to talk to someone - about the weather, about political stupidity; it didn't matter what. I just wanted to talk to somebody, but I couldn't think of anyone, not one person I could talk to. I didn't even have the cat."

Part science-fiction, part detective-story and part beat philosophy, Murakami's fictions are hard to place in their genre. They tend to read like Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely re-told by Flann O'Brien. Indeed, the cod epigraph to O'Brien's The Third Policeman might serve to characterize the denouement of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the supernatural confrontation in the mysterious hotel room 208: "Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death." As with O'Brien's books, the playfulness of Murakami's writing carries the reader along to sometimes unsettling conclusions about cherished realities.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle grew out of a short story that appeared in Murakami's 1993 collection, The Elephant Vanishes. In "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women", a revised version of which becomes the first chapter of the novel, there is a casual reference to a Mr Suzuki - "College professor, on TV half the time . . . Horrible family . . . Stuck-up, the whole lot of them. TV people are such a bunch of phonies." From this hint develops one of the book's central plot lines, the confrontation between Okada and Noboru Wataya, an extrapolation which is redolent of Murakami's approach to fiction itself. A minor incident, the observation of a seemingly unimportant detail, leads on to the uncovering of ever more elaborate systems and constructions, and ultimately to an intimation of the workings of a parallel order of things. Murakami has been hailed as one of the most important contemporary novelists, and this book will enhance and extend his reputation.