Murakami’s tenth novel is as nutty, funny and silly as any of those that have come before it. Haunted by an oedipal prophecy, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home to try to escape his fate. Meanwhile, Nakata Satoru (who once lost half his shadow to a UFO, but gained the ability to talk to cats) kills Johnnie Walker, and then — when “Johnnie Walker” turns out to be Kafka’s father — is drawn southwards in Tamura’s wake.

Still with me? In that case, here’s Hoshino, Nakata’s travelling companion, having a whinge: “These past ten days there’s been a lot of weird stuff going on. Leeches falling from the sky, Colonel Sanders popping up out of thin air, hot sex with this drop-dead-gorgeous philosophy major, swiping the entrance stone from that shrine . . . A lifetime of weird stuff.” If you think that all sounds like fun, then Kafka on the Shore may be just the book for you. If it sounds like one big gumbo of mumbo-jumbo, then you have been warned.

Murakami’s writing is often charming, and this book is no exception — sitting down to the plainness of his prose is as easy as watching television. It’s nice, as well — because although terrible things do happen, no one is nasty.

There is a hypnotic, spellbinding quality to Murakami’s through-the-looking-glass Japan, where spirits take on the forms of whisky icons, and omens manifest themselves as hails of fish and leeches.

But spellbinding though it may be, this is not Murakami at his best, and for long periods it is a frustrating piece of work. The juxtaposition of Greek myth and X-Files kookiness is uneasy, and apart from some brilliant episodes involving cats, fish and Colonel Sanders, the plot lacks the crackling, brilliant weirdness of the author’s short stories and recent novels.

There is also the problem of Kafka himself. “Cool as a cucumber, mysterious as the real Kafka”, Tamura is a typical Murakami hero, which is to say that he floats through the story, never quite connecting with the world, like those Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Christ with feet a few inches off the ground. His protagonists are often nameless (we never learn Kafka’s real first name) and aimless, with few ambitions. They are never in danger, and never create enemies. They are always falling in love, but the love never lasts. They are generally unemployed, but suffer no real hardship. Reality runs off the backs of these creations, leaving them and the world around them untouched. One of the effects of Nakata the cat-catcher’s childhood UFO trauma is that he “only has half a shadow”, but it isn’t he who feels as if he has suffered such a loss. It is Kafka who seems insubstantial, leaving the minor characters as Murakami’s most complete creations.

For example, Hoshino — the gluttonous, kind-hearted redneck trucker — is a wonderfully full-blooded invention. In his “Chunichi Dragons cap, green-tinted Ray-Bans, and aloha shirt”, Hoshino is like the comic turn in a Kurosawa film, and his journey with Nakata forms an entertaining counterpoint to the main narrative, echoing the English and Japanese traditions of the mechanicals’ subplot. Hoshino seems to bring out the best in Murakami’s writing, as when Colonel Sanders explains to him how he knows what he’s thinking: “By nature you’re an honest person. Everything you are thinking is written all over your face. It’s like one side of a split-open dried mackerel — everything inside your head’s laid out for all to see.” Occasionally, though, even Hoshino’s character blurs: at one point, having confessed to never having read a book in his life, he quotes Wordsworth.

Like all Murakami’s work, this novel is full of cultural name-dropping — Beethoven, Radiohead, Rolex Sea-Dweller Oysters. Enthusiasts suggest this referencing makes Murakami’s characters accessible, “citizens of the global village”, to quote one. But if so, this is a very particular kind of village in which every citizen is well educated, well off and well read. Murakami’s characters don’t eat McDonald’s, for example; they make perfect al dente pasta. They don’t play Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations (not even if they are 15-year-old boys); they name themselves after Eastern European writers. The cultural references are not there to internationalise the characters, but because they provide a feelgood factor, and because Murakami projects his own enthusiasms on to his characters.

More than any other contemporary Japanese novelist, Murakami is a writer at odds with his own country. One of the interesting things about Kafka on the Shore is that, as a story about running away, it is a disguised autobiography. Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood was a sensation in his own country, selling more than four million copies: fans dressed in green or red to emulate the covers of the first and second volumes, depending on which they preferred. In response, Murakami retreated, first to Europe, then to smalltown America. On a familial level, too, he has escaped: coming from a traditional Japanese background, his father a Buddhist priest, he writes in a style more American than that of many American writers.

Harvill continue to produce Murakami’s work well; Philip Gabriel’s translation is carefully done and Murakami’s prose is all the richer — and pleasantly weirder — for the translator’s fidelity to it.

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