The even-numbered chapters trace, beginning with a flurry of official documents, the life of a mentally defective sexagenarian, Satoru Nakata. He totes a carefully packed backpack and, in his head, talking in boldface, a scolding, exhorting alter ego called Crow-which is what Kafka means, or close to it, in Czech. The odd-numbered chapters serve up the first-person narrative of a fifteen-year-old runaway from his affluent, motherless home in Tokyo his father is a world-renowned sculptor, Koichi Tamura, and the son has given himself the peculiar first name Kafka. Alternate chapters relate the stories of two disparate but slowly converging heroes. Yet “Kafka on the Shore” has a schematic rigor in its execution. We often cannot imagine, while reading “Kafka on the Shore,” what will come next, and our suspicion-reinforced by Murakami’s comments in interviews, such as the one in last summer’s Paris Review-is that the author did not always know, either. Though his work abounds with references to contemporary American culture, especially its popular music, and though he details the banal quotidian with an amiable flatness reminiscent of Western youth and minimalist fiction in the hungover nineteen-seventies, his narratives are dreamlike, closer to the viscid surrealism of Kobo Abe than to the superheated but generally solid realism of Mishima and Tanizaki. Murakami, born in 1949, ran a Tokyo jazz club before he became a published writer, with the novel “Hear the Wind Sing,” in 1979. Spun out to four hundred and thirty-six pages, it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be. Haruki Murakami’s new novel, “Kafka on the Shore” (translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel Knopf $25.95), is a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender.

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