He also hooks up with an old school friend, Gotanda, now a disillusioned film star who once made love to Kiki in one of his many forgettable films.

Her father is a wildly successful but rather pompous novelist whose name is an anagram of Murakami's own. The narrator finds himself in loco parentis to Yuki (whose name means snow), a stroppy adolescent who, like Kiki, has extra-sensory powers and listens to Duran Duran and Iggy Pop. 'Waste,' he adds cynically, 'is the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society.' At night, he is haunted by the image of Kiki, the call girl with the beautiful ears and extra-sensory powers who took him on the wild sheep chase to the run-down Dolphin Hotel, then promptly disappeared. Early on, he admits that what he does is 'shovel cultural snow', not the most creative or meaningful of tasks perhaps but 'you do it because you have to, not because it's fun'. Now 34, his nameless narrator has switched careers, becoming an all-purpose hack who writes PR brochures and restaurant reviews. This, his fifth book to be translated into English, is the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, a difficult-to-categorise metaphysical tease in which a young copywriter is recruited by a mysterious stranger to trace a sheep with supernatural powers. He rejects the elegant formality and eroticised mysticism of his peers - Shusaku Endo, Kenzaburo Oe and Junchiro Tanizaki - in favour of a slangy, sardonic style punctuated with a roll call of American brand names. One reason for this may be that he speaks a language the post-war generation of Japanese, saturated in the Americana imported wholesale by the victorious occupiers of 1946, understand.

His books sell millions, not the mere hundreds of thousands that earn the label 'runaway success' for literary novels in the West. HARUKI MURAKAMI is Japan's best-selling novelist.

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami