Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko and Watanabe have grown romantically close since their friend's death, but their love is complicated by Naoko's depression. Watanabe has started at university in Tokyo the year after his best friend, Kizuki, killed himself. The Beatles song of the title, heard by the 37-year-old Toru Watanabe, is an aural Proustian madeleine that transports him back to his student days. 'That 'How on earth.?' ', Murakami comments, 'stuck in my head like a big question mark.' No wonder: it is also the cry of pain that fires the depths of his fiction. 'How on earth did this happen to us?' one woman asks. The book consists largely of edited transcripts of interviews conducted with survivors or relatives of victims. Murakami became obsessed with the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, in which Aum cult members released Sarin nerve gas on five separate trains.

This duty also informs his first non-fiction volume, Underground. And yet I find myself tossed into this labyrinth.' There is no moral justice in Murakami's world there is only the duty - both epistemological and moral - to try to understand. At one point he writes: 'I have never lied to anyone, and I have taken care over the years not to hurt other people. And yet the narrator, Toru Watanabe, is just as baffled by life.

Norwegian Wood, first published in Japan 13 years ago but only now translated for a western audience, might therefore puzzle the reader who has grown to love Murakami's haunting, melancholy surrealism: its action is resolutely realistic. He might be forced to hunt down an evil sheep that wants to take over the world, or to investigate his wife's spectral disappearance. And yet something happens: the ordinary man is catapulted into deranged circumstances. They live blameless lives, keep their heads down, indulge moderately in jazz and beer, hope things will stay the same. The men who narrate Haruki Murakami's novels repeatedly claim to be utterly ordinary.

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