Haruki Murakami is fast becoming the most popular foreign-language writer in America. He remixes pop, noir, and magical realism in a way we already associate with Japan: the stereotypical culture of “smart” fun, or postmodern pastiche. To this country’s literary elite, Mr. Murakami has been a magic bullet.

But in Japan he is an object of mass consumption. He actually publishes, in book form, collections of his e-mail correspondence with fans. Japan’s literary elite remained unconvinced until the publication of Murakami’s masterpiece, “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.” Now “Kafka on the Shore” (Alfred A. Knopf, 436 pages, $25.95), Mr. Murakami’s most ambitious novel since, has appeared in English. It is a careless, portentous book, one that provokes the overdue question: Is this guy serious?

Mr. Murakami has a knack for describing abstract feelings in a concrete, design-conscious way. Kafka Tamura, a 15-year-old runaway, comforts himself with exercise: “With a little click, the outlines of this being – me – fit right inside and are locked neatly away.” Mr. Murakami’s trademark big-brother persona is embodied by Oshima, a hermaphrodite who gives Kafka a job at a private library.

Oshima is a somewhat robotic encyclopedia of Western philosophy, but he occasionally produces wisdom of his own: “Both were rather precocious, and like many precocious young people they found it hard to grow up.” The precocious young couple in question are the head librarian, Miss Saeki, and her teenage lover, who was killed in a student uprising.

Before he died, Miss Saeki composed a pop hit, “Kafka on the Shore.” The song’s prophetic lyrics drive Mr. Murakami’s novel – much as the “One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them” mantra functions in the “Lord of the Rings.”

The second strand of Mr. Murakami’s narrative follows Nakata, a mentally retarded man who can talk to cats, and Hoshina, a truck driver who becomes Nakata’s disciple. While Kafka’s story of prophecy fulfillment is animated by desire – for sex, for safety – Nakata’s wanderings are purely arbitrary.

Indeed, arbitrariness is central to Mr. Murakami’s writing. In his fiction, much of what seems to be symbolic, or at least insoluble like a Zen koan, is nothing more than quirky. Early on, Nakata traces a stray cat to a cat killer who is costumed as Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky icon. This Johnnie Walker – literally wearing red tails and a black top hat – is collecting cat heads in order to construct a giant magic flute.

In no way does Mr. Murakami mean anything by any of this. Later he introduces a Colonel Sanders. It is all colorful, empty flash.

“When I’m writing,” Mr. Murakami has said in an interview, “I’m not thinking: I don’t know if they are good or evil. I still don’t know whether the Sheep Man is good or evil, and it’s the same with Johnnie Walker…. Both of them give a kick to the story, help it to move along.” What seems, to a receptive American audience, to be the literal realization of a world mediated by consumer choice and brand loyalty is only a machine for self-amusement.

Mr. Murakami’s fans might say that good storytelling is hard to find, and should be appreciated. His storytelling is indeed efficient. But storytelling is not the bottom of Mr. Murakami’s heart; rather, a sentimental masculinity is.

Mr. Murakami has translated most of Raymond Carver, many Fitzgerald stories, and recently J.D. Salinger. The passive-aggressive plainness of Carver’s prose, so free from hopeful striving, has had an unremarked influence on Murakami’s Saturday morning style. Both styles are “cool” – as in pretending not to care. Both styles peremptorily reject literary sophistication. But Mr. Murakami tries to have it both ways, appealing to an elitist taste for transcultural bricolage and artificiality.

The final verdict on “Kafka on the Shore” must concern its poverty as fiction. The first half of the book sets up a meditation on the necessity of killing; Kafka feels caught up “in the twisted dreams of a man named Hitler.” But these themes are dropped. Throughout the book, characters interact only as teacher and student – if they met as equals with competing needs, Mr. Murakami would have to dramatize the interaction.

He prefers for one character to lecture the other. None of the characters aspire to be other than themselves, they merely want to solve the puzzle and avoid the anonymous evil that lurks on the story’s periphery.

Bird, the hero of Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel-prize winning “A Personal Matter,” also spends time with Scotch. “Bird gazed enviously at the jolly Scotsman in the red cutaway striding across the Johnnie Walker label.” Bird asks a question that we could ask about Murakami’s trajectory: “Where was he going in such a hurry?”

Wherever it is, judging by “Kafka on the Shore,” we need not follow.