In a little book called “On Beauty and Being Just,” Elaine Scarry begins with a chapter about “Beauty and Being Wrong.” She describes the moment when she realized that she liked palm trees. For a long time she had ruled them out. Then one day, standing on a sunny balcony, she suddenly sees that they are beautiful. Their beauty hits her. She writes that “the revisionary moment comes as a perceptual slap or slam that itself has emphatic sensory qualities.”

But being wrong is not always so surprising. Sometimes we know that we are wrong, and are only waiting to find a way to explain our mistake to ourselves. For many years I have suspected that I was wrong about Haruki Murakami. I don’t expect many readers to care about the ins and outs of one critic’s personal taste. But I think my initial problems with Mr. Murakami’s books can explain something fundamental about their appeal.

I knew there was something snobbish in my dislike for Mr. Murakami. People I respected liked him: filmmakers, cooks, and readers less professionally tethered than myself. Mr. Murakami’s own interest in popular culture — one of his novels is called “Norwegian Wood” — dovetailed with a notion that he was not a writer’s writer, or even a reader’s writer, but a kind of extracurricular brain candy, good for a dead-end foray into contemporary literature.

And I had a more serious problem. I thought Mr. Murakami’s prose was a cheap retread of noir listlessness, reformatted for a world of lazy youths. A sample from Mr. Murakami’s new story collection, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” (Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $25), makes a good example: “What follows is the story of a guy I know, a high school classmate in Kobe. He was one of those guys who was an all-round star: good grades, good at sports, a natural leader.”

Why, I would have said, does he say “guy”? And just why does he tease us with that string of guidance counselor clichés? He’s not being sarcastic. So is he just getting American lingo wrong? Or perhaps his translator does him a disservice by writing in phrases such as “a natural leader.” Does anyone really say that, here or in Japan? And how can the narrator casually cede his place to this “guy I know” and the attendant clichés? Real fiction, I thought, would be either more or less engaged than this. There would be more feeling, more prick, in the way the story was told.

But I am beginning to think that there is something very bold about the way Mr. Murakami tells his stories. For one thing, the point of the story is always the story. He will begin with an improbability and then back it up without scruple. As the reader reads, disbelief does not mount; it blends into the fabric of the story. Look at this, from “The 1963/1982 Girl From Ipanema,” a “short short” Mr. Murakami wrote early in his career. The narrator is thinking about whether the girl in the Brazilian song has aged since the first time he heard it. He meets her on the beach and finds that she hasn’t. “Of course not,” she says, “I’m a metaphysical girl.” She shows him the sole of her foot, to prove it. “She’s right,” the narrator says, “it’s a wonderfully metaphysical sole.”

This is very bold, or at least very stubborn. Not quite like some postmodern fiction, which calls attention to its artifice as a text, Mr. Murakami’s writing calls attention to its artifice as a text written by an author who loves imaginary fiction. Take for example the following tangled metaphor. The narrator is thinking about a neglected aunt and the virtue hidden inside of her “like a corpse sealed inside a glacier — a magnificent glacier made of ice like stainless steel.” Ridiculous. But I get the picture. Look at this riff, on the theme of “death is death”: “A rabbit is a rabbit whether it springs out of a hat or a wheat field. A hot oven is a hot oven, and the black smoke rising from a chimney is what it is — black smoke rising from a chimney.” That’s too much, it’s unnecessary. An author should be slyer. Therefore this must not be an author talking. It must be a reader who overwrites. Mr. Murakami sells his credibility down the river, thereby earning the reader’s trust.

Even that dynamic is not a trick, but a position. For Mr. Murakami is above all a fan — in one story, he talks about how he’d like to believe in “A god of jazz” — he’s someone who has capitulated his ego in front of the things he likes. That is why his characters have so little pride, and why they follow their whims with such matter-of-factness. If his prose sometimes looks like reheated Raymond Carver, it still reads with a sincerity that will nag any skeptic.

“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” will do much to explain Mr. Murakami to even his fans. It collects early stories written before his other major English language collection, “The Elephant Vanishes.” Some very slight stories that have been appearing in magazines turn out to be occasional or commissioned pieces, or to be part of a phase of experimentation, as explained in Mr. Murakami’s introduction. And the final suite of new stories is better than Mr. Murakami’s recent novel, “Kafka on the Shore.”