While readers leaving comments have posted their own corrections about the issue, Amazon has put up no official explanation of what was its own mistake, leaving poor Mr. Murakami with a rating of only three stars, despite being #17 on Amazon's list of bestsellers.

"This kind of misinformation reflects poorly on both the author and publisher," wrote Knopf spokesperson Paul Bogaards in a refutation of a blog post on Gizmodo about the problem. "For a company that professes to have the interests of authors and readers inform the heart of their work, they need to do a better job of communicating their mistakes and instituting fixes."

The people speak.

"1Q84" by Haruki Murakami. (Courtesy Knopf)

The pleasures of reading Haruki Murakami could easily be mistaken for a list of his vices. His heroes are lonesome, underemployed everymen with casually refined tastes and plenty of time on their hands to be drawn into precarious intrigues or dispatched on romantic quests. But a friendless bachelor who likes nothing better than to crack open a can of beer while stirring a pot of spaghetti and listening to classical music in his Tokyo apartment you might also call a nonentity. That is, until the phone rings and on the other end is some mischievous operator or femme fatale. (Mr. Murakami’s female characters are hard to distinguish from common male fantasies.) These tend to get Mr. Murakami’s plots moving, to the extent that his one-thing-after-another books relay the impression of being plotted; indeed, they are often better when they don’t.

1Q84 (Knopf, 932 pages, $30) is a jumbo-size showcase of these double-edge qualities. It’s a thriller with cults, assassinations and a fair amount of sex at various levels of perversity; a fantasy novel with supernatural beings, an exploding dog, mystical paralyses and an immaculate conception. It’s a work of meta-fiction with texts within the texts, publishing intrigues and plenty of cultural morsels—Chekhov, Proust, Orwell, Janacek, lots of jazz—stewing (often inertly, especially in the case of Orwell, who lends the book its tinkered title and little else) amid the action. Structurally, it’s a love story, and a fairly corny one, about “a lonely boy and a lonely girl” separated at the age of 10, when they meaningfully held hands; each of them tries to find the other 20 years later, both utterly convinced that their reunion is their only chance at true love. Ten is an age to which Mr. Murakami’s novel attaches great significance. Besides the severed couple, who seem, like other characters in the book, to have forged their identities at that age, there is emphasis placed on 10-year age gaps between characters and a trio of 10-year-old girls who function as virgin sex priestesses for the Leader of the cult. Not everything here is as wholesome as holding hands.

The paradox of reading 1Q84 is that it’s a “page-turner” that is very easy to put down. We acquired our copy in July and put it down for weeks at a time. It is easy to pick back up again because of Mr. Murakami’s constant repetition of the various aspects of his premise and the slow progression of the novel’s events. This is somewhat due to the novel’s publication history. It is properly a trilogy and was released as three separate volumes in Japan, the first two on one day in 2009, the third a year later. The American edition feels bloated, and one way around that is to put weeks, months or years between your reading of the three parts.

Book 1 sets things up in alternating chapters told from the points of view of the now-30-ish grade-schoolers separated in 1964, Tengo and Aomame. Tengo is an aspiring writer who earns a living as a math teacher at a test-prep school. An editor draws him into a conspiracy to rewrite the amateurish manuscript of a fantasy novella written by a 17-year-old girl called Fuka-Eri, certain that if the story can be properly stylized the book will win a prize and become a best-seller, which it does. Yet as Tengo grows closer to Fuka-Eri and learns about her life from her guardian, Professor Ebisuno, it becomes clear that the book may actually be a literal account of her life within the radical anticapitalist cult Sakigake, started by her parents in the late 1960s. Fuka-Eri herself insists that the malevolent supernatural Little People in her story are real, but Mr. Murakami withholds the details of her story.

Meanwhile, Aomame is a full-time martial arts instructor and a freelance assassin of perpetrators of domestic violence, whom she ‘dispatches to another world’ with an ice pick-like needle applied to a point on the back of the neck, leaving her targets looking like they had suffered a heart attack. Her employer in the latter pursuit (perhaps the most politically correct form of vigilante justice a fiction writer could invent if not, after Stieg Larssen, the most original) is a dowager who runs a safe house for battered wives. A prepubescent girl arrives at the safe house, her uterus destroyed by intercourse with Sakigake’s Leader, the father of Fuka-Eri and Aomame’s next target. Before the end of the Book, the Little People crawl out of the girl’s mouth and cause a German shepherd to explode.

There is a lot of sex in Book 1. Tengo has it every Friday afternoon with a married woman 10 years his senior. Aomame has it with 40-something balding men she picks up in hotel bars, sometimes in the company of a female cop named Ayumi: “Aomame and Ayumi were the perfect pair to host intimate but fully erotic all-night sex feasts.” “It was,” Ayumi says of one night that Aomame was too drunk to remember, “like a porno movie.” Though she spends the night at his house, Fuka-Eri does not have sex with Tengo. “You,” she tells him, “just like the shape of my chest,” which is repeatedly said to be perfect, unlike Aomame’s, which is repeatedly said to be small and lopsided. In a less erotic but more romantic development, Aomame starts to see two moons in the sky and to believe she’s left the real 1984 and entered a zone she refers to as 1Q84.

In the manner of most trilogies, Book 2 is the best because it is the darkest. The villains show their faces. Tengo is menaced by an ugly man called Ushikawa (a name familiar to readers of Mr. Murakami’s 1997 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) who may be trying to buy him off under the auspices of a grant. (Beware the Guggenheim Foundation.) Aomame has her encounter with Sakigake’s Leader, who may be less evil than the dowager led her to believe. His intercourse with prepubescent girls occurs only while the Little People have paralyzed him, and the 10-year-olds may be not so much girls as “concepts.” Indeed, he is not even a charlatan; he can levitate an alarm clock. At the same time she kills him, Tengo experiences a similar paralysis and is mounted by Fuka-Eri. The sex in the second part is strictly spooky.

Book 3, not to spoil it entirely, is, like the last part of many trilogies, mostly ponderous. Aomame—apparently impregnated by Tengo during his sex with Fuka-Eri, a knocking-up knocked around by the Little People—spends most of it locked in an apartment waiting for Tengo to appear. Tengo spends most of it at his father’s death bed. Aomame dreams of Tengo; he sees her in a hallucination induced by hashish he smokes with a nurse. Mr. Murakami attempts to enliven the tedium—or heighten the suspense—by adding in alternating chapters from Ushikawa’s point of view. Hired by Sakigake thugs to find Aomame, he rehashes the events of the first two books in the manner of a detective story. His crucial discovery is that Aomame and Tengo went to grade school together and somehow must be connected. It would be a startling inference if the reader hadn’t been aware of it for 800 pages.

John Updike once linked the supernatural elements in Mr. Murakami’s writing to the influence of Shintoism, admitting “the Western reader may feel, a bit queasily, at sea.” That much is true, but the supernatural has seemed to have had a side effect in Mr. Murakami’s recent books, especially 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore: sub-melodramatic sentimentality. It’s also rendered sex grotesque: either ideally romantic, emptily casual, brutally violent or so mystical as to not really be sex at all. There’s little in the way of mixed feelings, which are to many of us the stuff of life. In this way, 1Q84, a novel that strives to contain everything, delivers very little besides an occasionally fun adventure. It may have something to do with the fact that every single character in the book comes from a broken family. Late in the novel Tengo thinks with scorn of an “ordinary” family, a wife cooking rice for her husband and children. How does he imagine his life after reuniting with Aomame? Perhaps Mr. Murakami is at work on a sequel, 1Q94, in which Aomame is still driving her needle into deviants’ backs, Tengo is turning out Austeresque best-sellers, their offspring starts a magical Nirvana cover band and a fugitive wood sprite is on hand to cook the rice.

editorial@observer.com

The American version.

On the occasion of his 25th anniversary of designing book covers for Knopf, Chip Kidd discusses the design for the cover of Haruki Murakami's new novel, 1Q84. Mr. Kidd engaged in "positive-negative play with the cover and the binding" that allows the subject on the cover to "exist in two different planes of reality."

The British version.

Knopf, which published Norwegian Wood in America on its Vintage paperback imprint, has responded with the following statement:

“We are disheartened to learn about the action by a New Jersey school district to remove a book from its required reading list due to objections from a group of concerned parents. The novel, NORWEGIAN WOOD by Haruki Murakami, was originally selected for the list based on suggestions by teachers, librarians, and administrators within the district, and the list was approved by the board of education. It is unfortunate the parents felt the need to dismiss such an important work of fiction and regrettable the school district would succumb to such pressure and disregard the recommendation of its own professional educators.”

1. Ukranian Billionaire Selects Art-Prize Nominees
Victor Punchuk's PinchukArtCentre announced the nominees for his $100,000 Generation Art Prize. He funds the award, which goes to an emerging artist up to age 35. Whitney Biennial exhibitor (2008) Ruben Ochoa is the only American on the short list.

Our take: We're so glad the oligarchs are back. And points for a diverse group—the 21 finalists hail from 18 different countries and include 13 men and 8 women.

2. BP Corporate Art Sponsorship Backlash
In the UK, debate rages over BP's sponsorship of British cultural institutions. Vigilante groups have staged protests at partner museums-one group filled the Tate's grand hall with dead fish hanging from black balloons. Bloggers take their corners: Culturegrrl argues that museums shouldn't reject the money, while Edward Winkelman feels the BP backlash is too little, too late.

Our take: Why get angry at cultural institutions supported by BP when you could get angry at BP itself?
[The Guardian, Artnet, Culturegrrl, Edward Winkelman]

3. Louis Vuitton Demands Removal of Copycat Sculptures
Louis Vuitton demanded the removal of nine sculptures of locusts made out of fake designer purses that were on view at the Kobe Fashion Museum in Japan. The fashion house argued that the sculptures endorsed the illegal trade of counterfeit goods.

Our take: Murakami can install an entire LV boutique in the Brooklyn Museum, but artist Mitsuhiro Okamoto can't even use the designer's logo. Who's really getting ripped off here?
[Pinktentakle]

4. Yale Finds Velazquez Painting in Basement
In what may be Yale's most exciting basement cleaning session ever, University art gallery employees happened upon a painting of the Virgin Mary that they have officially attributed to Velazquez after years of research.

Our take: We were cynical, but it looks like the real deal. All we find when we clean out our basements are yellowed family photos and old boxes of Pringles.
[Bloomberg]

5. Charles Saatchi to Donate Collection and Gallery to Britain
Gallery impresario Charles Saatchi announced over the weekend that he would donate his collection, valued (very conservatively) at more than $37.5 million, and his London gallery to the nation of Britain upon his retirement. The Guardian isn't too impressed.

Our take: Looks like the Tate didn't schmooze over its contentious relationship with Saatchi in time to cash in.
[The Guardian]

6. Marilyn Manson and David Lynch Exhibition Opens
What do you get when you combine Marilyn Manson, David Lynch, watercolors, and a short film titled "The Amputee"? The Manson/Lynch exhibition "Geneaologies of Pain," which opened in Vienna on June 30. According to a press release, "Marilyn Manson's career as an artist started in 1999 when he produced conceptual five-minute watercolors which he sold to drug dealers."

Our take: "Pain" gives a new and unwelcome meaning to "cutting-edge art."

7. Guggenheim Expansion Provokes Protest
The Guggenheim Foundation announced interest in building a museum in the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, 25 miles from Frank Gehry's iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. The regional Basque government and many local people fiercely oppose the expansion, arguing it will irreparably damage the nature reserve.  

Our take: If authorities in the Basque regional government were given more of a voice in the proceedings, the two parties might be able to make this happen.
[The Guardian]

8. Artist Gao Yu to Design Bottle for Absolut Vodka  
This week in corporate artist partnerships: Absolut Vodka has commissioned Chinese Pop artist Gao Yu to design a limited-edition bottle in honor of this year's Shanghai Expo.

Our take: Andy Warhol designed a bottle for Absolut 25 years ago. Is there any corporate collaboration that man didn't do first?

9. Sarah Palin is Rendered in Porn
British artist Jonathan Yeo's latest exhibition includes a portrait of Sarah Palin made entirely from clippings from pornography magazines. (All the better, the image has been placed in a furry moose head frame.) Other celebrities given Yeo's pornographic treatment include Tiger Woods, Sigmund Freud, and Paris Hilton, whose portrait-in-porn was bought by Damien Hirst.

Our take: When a politician headlines a controversy dubbed "Boobgate," isn't it only a matter of time until Playboy gets involved?
[Artinfo]
 
10. Art Market Heats Up for Summer
Artnet rounds up results from the summer's hottest sales, which include the highly anticipated Impressionist and modern auctions as well as contemporary art sales at Sotheby's and Christie's. In June, about 230 artists achieved record sale prices above $100,000 (up from 120 for the same price bracket in May).

Our take: We'll take any signs of recovery we can get, but we know deep down it's not all coming up records and roses.
[Artnet, Transom, ArtObserved]

What's strange about the piece is that it ends with an apology to a semi-anonymous reader called "Jacob S." who complained the day before about editors and writers abusing the title of Raymond Carver's 1981 short-story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

In his comment, Mr. S. wrote:

Setting aside Mr. S.'s use of "interwebs," itself a "meh" blogger cliché ("said" phrase was amusing once, but now "not so much"). it's not just literary blogs that use Mr. Carver's—or, more like, Gordon Lish's—phrase. These examples come from The New York Times:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Lust, August 23, 1998.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Editing, July 31, 2005.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands, November 24, 2006.

When We Talk About Editing, October 17, 2007.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Art, December 23, 2007.

Maybe Mr. S. is right. When editors decide to class up their headlines with references to Mr. Carver's oeuvre, maybe they should think of his other collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and not talk so much when they talk about something.

So what does America want to know about Mr. Murakami? Here are some gems:

Haruki Murakami works wonders with daytime. In the Japanese novelist’s very best books—Dance Dance Dance (1988) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)—un- or semi-employed protagonists discover that, when the rest of us are stuck at work, the everyday world turns out to be as startling and strange as the high seas Sinbad sailed away on.

After Dark, Mr. Murakami’s latest, confines itself instead to the witching hours between 11:56 p.m. and 6:52 a.m. (A clock face, mighty handy, begins every chapter, but you will have to supply your own jazz soundtrack.) There isn’t a plot here so much as a flipbook of Edward Hopper paintings. See the clean, well-lighted diners, the mini-marts and empty swing sets, the darkened office cubicles and by-the-hour hotel rooms.

And in the foreground, a roundup of the usual screwballs: the too-talkative trombonist and the former lady wrestler; the Chinese hooker who gets the stuffing beaten out of her and the businessman who returns to work wondering why the hand he hit her with won’t stop hurting; the plain-Jane insomniac who strangers treat like a confessional booth and her sleeping-beauty sister, out cold for two months straight, except, of course, for the brief, nightmare portion of this particular evening, which she spends literally trapped inside her television set. This is not to mention the convenience-store clerk who intercepts the menacing call meant for somebody else and the runaway girl branded like cattle by someone bad somewhere else. They are all of them dull as drunks at the end of the bar.

Not to harp, but Mr. Murakami used to do better than this. For starters, all his kooky characters used to have a lovely, honest, uncanny—well—kookiness, and the conversations they had, however meandering, meant something, to them and to us. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Dance Dance Dance both had the structure and melancholic cool of hardboiled detective fiction, but instead of puzzling out who got killed where with what, they were devoted to solving the mystery of how, after great falls, human beings actually can be put back together again. They were novels of rehabilitation.

Those masterpieces came out a long time ago now. And I’ve begun to worry that Mr. Murakami was totally and completely broken by 1995, which was worse for Japan than 2001 was for New York: first the Kobe earthquake, about which he wrote a short-story collection, then the sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, of which he gathered an oral history. Since then, he’s mostly written books about how people get lost and stay that way.

So before the runaway lifts up her shirt to show off burns the shape of bird’s feet, she discloses what passes, amid Mr. Murakami’s many riddles and weird visions, for a thesis statement, and the news is bad: “The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.”

Still, Mr. Murakami lets there be light. Commuter trains fill back up. Traffic patterns re-form. Everybody wakes up, except the characters in the book, who crawl into bed and get the deep or troubled sleep they deserve. At which point, After Dark blinks shut, like a dream you’ve already forgotten.

Mark Lotto is a frequent contributor to The Observer.

Many of the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are structured around a character’s lucid recollection of a strange or vivid incident from his or her past. A young man thinks back on the bizarre daydreams of a hospitalized classmate in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”; a girl remembers a mysterious run-in with a restaurant owner on her 20th birthday in “Birthday Girl”; a young man recalls a haunting night spent as a watchman in “The Mirror”; the narrator’s polyamorous friend tells of a 40-day spell when he was visited by daily vomiting and punctual prank phone calls in “Nausea 1979.” A story called “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism” is about the unexpected adult confessions of one man’s boyhood all-star classmate, and “The Seventh Man” is about another storyteller’s childhood brush with a typhoon. In each case the notable episode defies explanation, and the reader is led to believe that it’s precisely the lack of resolution that has spurred the retelling.

Paired with scattered references to the meaning of storytelling, the repeated narrative device of framing a story within a story also lends the collection as a whole a mood of literary/philosophical inquiry. “The Mirror” begins: “All the stories you’ve been telling tonight seem to fall into two categories,” and the opening of “The Seventh Man” announces that the speaker was “the last one to tell his story that night.” The opening paragraphs of “The Year of Spaghetti” include the explanatory line, “This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971 A.D.,” and near the end of “Nausea 1979,” the storyteller tells the narrator, “I guess that’s why you’re a writer and I’m not.” In a particularly flagrant display of writerly self-consciousness, “Chance Traveler” opens: “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of the story.” Mr. Murakami wisely uses these touches of metafictional speculation only sparingly; he trusts that the utter originality of his stories itself is enough to hold his readers.

And, as usual, it does. Mr. Murakami possesses a unique talent for fusing stark realism with unfettered imaginings. In this passage, from in “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” a man waits for his lover to give him an answer: “With her back to me, she allowed her slender fingers to trail in the water. It seemed as if my question were coursing through her fingers to be conducted to the ruined city beneath the water. It’s still down there, I’m sure, the question mark glittering at the bottom of the pond like a polished metal fragment. For all I know, it’s showering the cola cans around it with that same question.”

If Mr. Murakami’s novels tend towards somber reflections on mortality and the tragedy of life’s inherent uncontrollability, in his short stories, it’s more often a bittersweet zest for life—here, life at its most fantastic, unpredictable and otherworldly—that triumphs. Sections from “Man-Eating Cats,” for instance, reveal a softer and more whimsical version of passages from Sputnik Sweetheart (2001). In the novel, we get an exchange between a young woman and young man caught in a love triangle: The young man lusts after the young woman, who’s in the grip of an urgent, unrequited love for an older women. These thwarted passions give a newspaper account of the man-eating cats found in a dead woman’s apartment a dark absurdity. In the story, the same anecdote is shared between vacationing lovers, and the whole episode takes on a fresh levity.

“A Shinagawa Monkey” is another story that manages to tackle serious themes in a light-hearted way. The story opens with a young married woman noticing that “recently she’d had trouble remembering her own name.” Unable to find an explanation for these mysterious lapses of memory, and dissatisfied with the temporary solution of engraving her name on a charm bracelet, Mizuki Ando seeks the help of a tiny counseling center, which after several sessions tracks down a mischievous Shinagawa monkey lurking in sewers, waiting for the opportunity to snatch away names.

“I’m a monkey who takes people’s names,” the Shinagawa monkey tells Mizuki. “It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I spot a name I can’t help myself.” The encounter proves profoundly life-changing: The monkey is able to tell Mizuki the things that have “stuck” to her name, and the truth is nothing short of devastating. “Your mother doesn’t love you. She’s never loved you,” says the Shinagawa monkey, and “you don’t truly love your husband.” That the entire episode manages to be both genuinely cathartic and delightfully fanciful is a testament to Mr. Murakami’s gift as a storyteller.

For Mr. Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the product of insuppressible and spontaneous—as opposed to more deliberate, disciplined—expression. Some of the stories in this collection were written in the early 1980’s, but most of them date from 2005, when Mr. Murakami, inspired by a “powerful urge,” went on a story-writing binge: He wrote five in about a month, then churned out several more. Perhaps the strength of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (which recently won the $45,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award) ultimately derives from the fact that Haruki Murakami, as he notes in his introduction, finds “writing novels a challenge [and] writing short stories a joy.” As the Shinagawa monkey says of his own vocation, “It’s what I do.”

Mythili Rao is a graduate student in English and American literature at N.Y.U. and a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

This is the way these things happen, don't ask why. Nakata has a mind that works simply, even if he's not exactly a simpleton. He forgets a lot; he doesn't understand everything said to him; but he can talk to cats. Does that odd facility balance his other shortcomings? Not really worth asking; it's not a world of checks and balances so much as blind luck. Still, because of his conversational prowess with cats, Nakata is often hired to find missing felines. He's looking for a tortoise-shell named Goma. And he has heard that a man wearing a top hat and black boots may be helpful.

Well, one day a bad-tempered dog takes Nakata to this man: It turns out that the fellow is Johnnie Walker, the figure on the famous whisky bottle, and he has an avocado-colored refrigerator, filled with the heads of cats "arranged on three shelves like oranges at a fruit stand." (Haruki Murakami likes fruit and vegetables, not just to eat, but as emblems of growth and health.)

Johnnie Walker kills cats. He drugs them to induce paralysis (but not enough to eliminate the pain). Then he slits open the chest, removes the heart and cuts off the head. He has a bag with five captured cats in it, one of them Goma. This is all part of Johnnie Walker's plan. As he points out to Nakata, Johnnie Walker intends to kill Goma, whereas Nakata wants that cat. It's the old conflict of interests. They must negotiate. What must I do to save Goma? Nakata wonders. Ah, says Johnnie Walker, you must kill me, because "I'm sick and tired of killing cats, but as long as I live that's what I have to do."

Nakata protests: He cannot do such a thing. Johnnie Walker is understanding. Think of it as a war, he advises, when people have to do things they might not want to do. As encouragement, he takes the first cat out of the bag and cuts out its heart: "Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he popped the heart into his mouth and began chewing silently, leisurely savoring the taste. His eyes glistened like a child enjoying a pastry hot from the oven."

Similes and other such flights of speech are not common in Haruki Murakami's new novel, Kafka on the Shore, and when they come, they are as simple, bright and piercing as a lemon just cut open, so tasty but enough to bring tears to the eye or make a recent wound smart. Anyone here wounded? There must be someone, don't be shy about owning up-in this world, sudden, inexplicable blood-lettings are only to be expected. It's a cat's life, after all, and you can be sitting curled up purring one minute and an autopsy specimen the next.

Who is Kafka, you might very well ask, and what's he doing in Japan? Indeed, it would be suspicious, and likely to attract the police, if you didn't ask. Ah, who is Kafka? you want to know. Very well. He's a boy who decided to run away from home and father on his 15th birthday. Off he goes, and decides to say that his name is Kafka Tamura. "Weird name," says the girl he meets on a bus, Sakura. But she is amiable in an impersonal way and helps him along. She lets him spend a night at her place, she kindly jerks him off and says, yes, of course, it's all right if he wants to imagine her naked. After all, imagining is a very private thing.

Kafka spends his days in a library, and he makes friends there with one of the librarians, Oshima, who takes Kafka off on a long drive in his green Mazda Miata to a cabin in the woods, where Kafka can stay. It's a simple life there, no electricity or running water, but there's a pure stream nearby and a gas stove, with supplies and lots of good reading. Just don't go too deep into the woods, warns Oshima, because it's far easier to get lost than you might imagine.

Why a deserted place in the middle of the woods? Well, I'm not saying, and you won't know at first, since you're only a reader-though readers are just as important as writers in this tricky process-but I will observe that the stories of Kafka and Nakata are mixed in with reports of a strange incident from 1944. This is what happened: As the war went on, a teacher took 16 students into the woods one day, to look for mushrooms and, of course, to experience the woodsiness of the woods. They thought a silver plane passed overhead-a B-29, perhaps. After all, this was the war and the Americans were growing bold. Anyway, right after that, the children all lost consciousness.

As you can imagine, there was an investigation. And then, after the war, the Americans took up the matter, adding that no B-29 had been anywhere in the vicinity that day. Fifteen of the children recovered consciousness and seemed to have suffered no damage at all, physical or mental. They simply did not recall the event. One boy did not recover, and he was taken away to hospital. The teacher was not affected. She had done all she could to help her pupils. And she answered the questions of the inquiry. But she admits, years later, that she didn't give all the information available. You see, she was embarrassed to admit that, thinking of sex with her husband on the woodland walk, she suddenly realized that her period had begun, though it was not her time. As I've suggested, in Kafka on the Shore there's altogether too much blood for mere coincidence. It's something you're going to have to be on the look-out for.

And if it occurs to you that that one boy who went away to the hospital could be Nakata, I'd say you were getting warm. But does that amount to an explanation of why Nakata and cats can talk together in the largely matter-of-fact way that cats seem to prefer?

I don't know whether this is "magical realism" or whatever. Cats don't have to grasp literary theory if the story being told is as remorselessly compelling as this. I think it's far more useful to study the bare-bones directness of Mr. Murakami's prose, the professional insistence on seeing what happened next and how it happened, and then the nearly throwaway touch of poetry. Take Kafka in his cabin in the woods, the first morning when he wakes up and sees where he is: "The morning light pours down through the tall trees onto the open spaces in front of the cabin, sunbeams everywhere and mist floating like freshly minted souls."

Let me put it this way: I came to Japanese culture through the movies first-essentially through Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi. In Kurosawa, I always felt the exhilaration of a boyish attempt to make Japan accessible to the West-it was history as a reassuring tourist movie. In Ozu, I believed I discovered the character of the Japanese family and the close yet secret interiors where they lived and waited. But in Mizoguchi, I seemed to be confronting Japanese light and space and the strange sense of a view of fate and nature quite unlike anything I knew from Europe or America.

It seemed then, and it seems to me now, that Mizoguchi is the greatest master in Japanese cinema, and there's nothing in his work that I love more than the casual description of space which then turns into a haunted or hallowed place. Mr. Murakami has that same touch, yet he applies it to a modern country, where characters may listen to Prince or Schubert on their Walkmans, where Kafka stays up at night reading about Adolf Eichmann, and in which the narrator has as much appetite for the look of a cat and the jarring sight of Nakata in "a salmon pink Jack Nicklaus golf shirt."

Is this a real Japan, or is it simply the vision of a great novelist? It's not easy to offer anything like an explanation, and in the end, I don't think Mr. Murakami is ready to settle for a world susceptible to explanation. You can say that this book proceeds by cross-cutting, going from one story to another, but then you have to account for the reader being as hooked as surely as if he were reading Agatha Christie or Hemingway, where the story is meant to go straight and taut like a fishing line with a trout on the hook. So I think it's the cutting that's the motor, every bit as much as the separate stories and their use of common suspense. For it's in the cutting and the departures that the element of rhyme or similarity begins to assert itself, and all that Haruki Murakami will settle for finally, I think, is that yes, there are things (like blood and clear places in the forest) that are like other things. And that is why this Japanese kid teenager is like the earlier Kafka-what was his name?-the one whose very sharp features give every suggestion that if he couldn't exactly talk to cats, he sure knew what they meant.

David Thomson's most recent book is The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (Knopf).