Haruki Murakami conducts a quest into the past as his hero tries to understand a long-ago rejection

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
by Haruki Murakami
Knopf

Haruki Murakami is many things to many people. Prophet, meta-fictional guru, excavator of Japanese society and culture, Kafkaesque conspiracy theorist, pop-culture titan, experimental novelist par excellence, and - as the million readers who bought Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in its first week of publication can attest - a bona fide bestseller.

His 13th full-length work of fiction draws from many of these familiar wellsprings. It is disarmingly easy to read - disarming because the plot is undramatic to the point of being, well, colourless. A man recalls intense absent friendships from his past, seeks them out on the orders of his on-off girlfriend, learns a startling secret and that's pretty much it - although of course it isn't, not by a long shot.

Our hero is Tsukuru Tazaki, although exactly what kind of hero he is puzzles the imagination: "Sometimes, when he looked at his face in the mirror, he detected an incurable boredom. He had no deep interest in the arts, no hobby or special skill. He was, if anything, a bit taciturn; he blushed easily, wasn't especially outgoing, and could never relax around people he'd just met."

As big build-ups go, this is hardly on a par with Homer introducing Odysseus, Shakespeare preparing us for Othello, or Bret Easton Ellis slipping Patrick Bateman's psychopathology under our radar. Instead, Tsukuru is 36 years old and attracted to train stations (a hobby of sorts, surely) to the extent that he works for a railway company designing stations in the Kanto region around Tokyo.

As Murakami's title teases, Tsukuru is ordinary to the point of invisibility: "Though he lacked a striking personality, or any qualities that made him stand out, and despite always aiming for what was average, the middle of the road, there was (or seemed to be) something about him that wasn't exactly normal, something that set him apart."