The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Fifty years ago, if you had asked literary critics to forecast the future course of the novel, they probably would have predicted a great awakening of wordplay and experimentation with language. But they would have been wrong. Many of the most provocative writers of recent decades have stuck to conventional sentences and normal syntax (pace Joyce). Yet they have made daring explorations of the nature of reality. In short, their progressive tendencies have proven to be metaphysical rather than linguistic.

This re-examination of the real is at the heart of the fantastical landscapes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the pulp fiction-ish narratives of Philip K. Dick, the ‘alternative universe’ histories of Michael Chabon and Philip Roth, and the sci-fi scenarios of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Indeed, the pervasive incorporation of sci-fi plots into serious fiction, from Kazuo Ishiguro to Jonathan Lethem, is a recurring and unmistakable sign of this pronounced shift in the literary weather.

Few writers have poked more holes in conventional notions of reality than the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Other authors have explored what has come to be known as “magical realism,” but most of them — such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Ben Okri — have set their visionary tales in Third World locales where myth and folklore loom large over the cultural landscape. In these environments, magical realism seems a natural extension of an on-going and tradition-laden literary dialogue.

But Murakami concocts his magical stories in the midst of affluent modern-day consumer settings. When fish start falling from the sky or cats talk to humans — both of which happen in the course of his Kafka on the Shore — it is amid the hustle and bustle of contemporary Japanese urban life. This ability to capture the phantasmagorical in the thick of commuter traffic and high-rise architecture is the distinctive calling card of Murakami. Like magician David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear (or at least seem to disappear), Murakami mesmerizes us by working his legerdemain in places where reality would seem to be rock solid.

Murakami started off as the J.D. Salinger of Japan, rising to fame with his very successful Norwegian Wood (1987). This was straight-forward narrative, without any talking cats, but even here the novelist showed a pronounced interest in off-kilter characters with mental problems of various sorts and degrees, thus presaging his later shift into murkier psychic waters. By the time we get to his masterful The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), the reader can no longer tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The protagonist can walk through walls and heal people by laying on hands. Or can he? The closer you look at the story, the more it blurs around the edges.