If you're unfamiliar with Murakami's work and want to give it a try, start with "A Wild Sheep Chase." A melancholy yet irreverent phantasmagoria about an ad guy, a girl with beautiful ears, a mysterious sheep and Japanese guilt over World War II, it suggests a 21st century cross between "Absalom, Absalom!" and "Mothra," and it's still fresh and moving. My guess is that in this zingless new novel, the writer thinks he's using Hajime's tale to wrestle with what Thomas McGuane once called "the sadness-with-no-name," a forlornness many baby boomers fall prey to and can't shake off.

His two most successful novels, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), are in essence spiritual ghost stories set in Tokyo. In each, an aimless male narrator tries to find a lover who has disappeared on him. There are corporatized villains and surprise endings.

Mr. Murakami’s new book, South of the Border, West of the Sun, has similar elements. Hajime is your typical Murakami hero. Married to a passive, unstable woman, he drives a BMW, works out at the gym and listens to Billy Strayhorn. His father-in-law is a deeply corrupt businessman whose practices disturb him. And–as Mr. Murakami himself once did–Hajime manages a hot Tokyo jazz bar.

Looking into her eyes, he glimpses the cold void. Yet he makes plans to leave his wife and two children for her.

This story contains passages that are among Murakami’s finest. The protagonist’s calm recollection of his boyhood search for a girl who had "something special that existed just for me," is haunting and natural. He is still struggling over his betrayal of his first lover, shy Izumi. After Hajime fell helplessly into a torrid sexual relationship with Izumi’s cousin, Izumi discovered it–and it broke her forever. The betrayal also shaped Hajime’s understanding of himself.

Just as honest and plain are the descriptions of running a jazz bar. Here Hajime explains why he pays his bartender well: "Most people don’t realize it, but good cocktails demand talent. Anyone can make passable drinks with a little effort.… Take me: I think I can mix up a pretty mean cocktail. I’ve studied and practiced. But there’s no way I can compete with him. I put in exactly the same liquor, shake the shaker for exactly the same amount of time, and guess what–it doesn’t taste as good. I have no idea why.… It’s like art. There’s a line only certain people can cross. So once you find someone with talent, you’d best take good care of them, and never let them go."

But I can’t say this book wholly succeeds. At times the author flirts with the method that has made other works of his forgettable: a dreamscape fiction, connected to nothing. And though Mr. Murakami has many a time practiced the disappearing-woman trick on his readers to great effect, in this case he provides too little information about his subject to get you to truly care. Where did Shimamoto get her money? Is she connected to Hajime’s insider-trading father-in-law? Is she even alive?

Hajime tells us far more about himself, his job, his loves, his consciousness. That’s a lot. I wanted more.

Fans of Haruki Murakami's previous novels, which include ``A Wild Sheep Chase'' and ``Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,'' will recognize the social satire masked as self-deprecation, and the deadpan tone which the author -- frequently compared to Thomas Pynchon -- habitually uses to describe both mundane and blatantly surreal events. But ``South of the Border, West of the Sun'' is Murakami's most domestic and perhaps most deeply moving novel. Gone is the peripatetic pace -- Hokkaido to Hawaii and many altered states in between -- and the private-eye swagger of 1988's ``Dance Dance Dance.'' Gone too is the expansive cultural and historical territory covered by 1995's ``The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' in which a househusband's search for his runaway wife takes him backward in time to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, through a contemporary labyrinth of politicians and fashion designers, and into an alternate reality mediated by a troubled teenage girl and a pair of clairvoyant sisters whose client list boasts some of Tokyo's most powerful businessmen.

For American readers, the fact that much of that culture is familiar, based on Western imports and global brand names, while the rest seems wholly foreign, only adds to the sense of eerily layered and competing realities. Indeed, the experience is analogous to the one Murakami describes in ``South of the Border, West of the Sun.'' As children, Hajime and Shimamoto have listened to Nat King Cole's album so many times that Hajime can imitate the opening lines of songs. ``Of course,'' he explains, ``we had no idea what the English lyrics meant. To us they were more like a chant.'' And yet the mysterious words ``seemed to express a certain way of looking at life.''

Shimamoto proves to be a far more reckless spirit than one usually looks to for completion, but the mystery that surrounds her is just that, something not explained rather than something that defies explanation. (One can imagine Murakami chuckling and quoting Freud's famous remark that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.) It is almost as if the novelist were suiting his structure to his thoroughly conventional protagonist, a man who might well have had three-quarters of a child, if only it were possible, to better fit the demographic profile of his generation. And yet, Murakami's layered meanings remain. Where once his ideas arrived exploded -- rather in the manner of an architectural drawing -- into separate three-dimensional images, now they are compressed into a resonant emblematic whole.

Ironically, Hajime's true undiscovered country turns out be his wife. Yukiko's plumply serene domesticity masks a private hell he never suspected, which had been encountered and overcome before they met, and a tough-minded but unshakable belief in the earthly paradise that is possible only in the here and now.

When Hajime and Shimamoto first meet, they are 12 years old. Polio has left Shimamoto lame and her defenses strong -- she is precocious and self-possessed -- but Hajime detects something softer: ''Something very much like a child playing hide-and-seek, hidden deep within her, yet hoping to be found.'' After school, they spend idyllic hours on the sofa drinking tea while listening to Shimamoto's father's records -- Nat (King) Cole, Liszt's piano concertos, the ''Peer Gynt'' Suite. When she momentarily, almost distractedly, grasps his hand one day, his erotic fate, though he doesn't realize it then, is sealed: ''It was merely the small, warm hand of a 12-year-old girl, yet those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know -- and everything I had to know.'' The 10 seconds of their single physical exchange constitute the first stirrings of his sexual awakening.

Their expulsion from paradise comes at the end of the school year. Hajime moves to a nearby town, and the small distance, given their age, is all it takes to sever their connection. He visits Shimamoto a few times, and then, increasingly immersed in his new world, he simply stops. His high school years pass in typical alienated fashion -- with Hajime in the bedroom, the door shut -- until he finds a girlfriend, Izumi, a kind of ''Splendor in the Grass'' Natalie Wood: what he craves, she resists, and they proceed haltingly until Hajime meets the first woman he sleeps with, the first woman to arouse and respond to the intensity of his sexual yearning.

The woman happens to be Izumi's cousin, and they proceed by way of naked instinct. The fact that this ''necessary, natural act, one allowing no room for doubt'' succeeds in destroying another person -- Izumi discovers the betrayal -- is something Hajime could have had no way of anticipating, or any way of averting, and he reaches a cruel realization: that sexual passion has no moral dimension; he feels oddly guiltless. ''It has nothing to do with us,'' he says by way of useless explanation to Izumi. For the first time in his life he wonders, bewildered, who he really is, and for the first time understands that he is defined and motivated by what just about every writer has a particular name for -- Chekhov refers to it as ''irresistible force,'' Goethe as ''elective affinity''; Murakami calls it ''magnetism.''

The event recalls an episode in Murakami's remarkable last (and more ambitious) novel, ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.'' In one of the most succinct and brutally frank letters in literature concerning sexual betrayal, an estranged wife writes to her husband: ''At that time, my body experienced this violent, irrepressible hunger. I could do nothing to resist it. Why such things happen I have no idea. All I can say is that it did happen.'' This inexplicable hunger is the true subject of ''South of the Border, West of the Sun.'' And in the story's spareness and quiet eroticism, it is tempting to make a correlation with some of the celebrated novels of Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, predecessors whose work Murakami has always distanced himself from in favor of Western influences like Fitzgerald and Chandler. But there's nothing decadent or perverse about Murakami's eroticism. Nor is there anything gratuitous or transgressive about it. That he manages, in his sexual explicitness, to make intimacy real -- appealing and unembarrassing, innocent even -- stands him in contrast to the work of many American writers, from A. M. Homes to Bret Easton Ellis, whose treatment of the sexual has been one of calculated offensiveness.

Hajime drifts through his 20's, finally marrying a younger woman he meets by accident on the street. He goes to work for his father-in-law, a shady operator in the construction business who gives him the capital to open his own nightclub, and before long, accoutered in Soprani and Rossetti, he's driving around in a BMW 320 listening to Schubert's ''Winterreise.'' But he can't escape the nagging sense of the inauthenticity, the unreality, of his life, and he begins to long for the purity of his youth, when he was miserable but ''pared down to the essentials'' -- when the only thing he sought was ''the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial.''

Inevitably, Shimamoto makes an appearance. She and Hajime meet at the club one night and fall into conversation that has both the out-of-kilter feeling of a dream sequence and the clang of actual grown-up talk, which underscores the loss of their innocence. A worldly crassness has marked them both. And Shimamoto's fata morgana quality -- she will reveal nothing about her present circumstances and passes without warning from Hajime's life for months at a time -- suggests ties to a more corrupt and sinister world from which she is unable to escape. When she leaves the club that evening, Hajime is left wondering whether he hasn't just dreamed it all. Only objects remain: an empty glass and lipstick-stained Salems stubbed out in the ashtray. But are they actually proof of anything? The surrealism that has become a hallmark of Murakami's work arises here from the kind of extreme emotional state that can loosen reality from its moorings.

Midway through the novel, the tone begins to shift, taking on a poetic, sensual and increasingly vertiginous cast. The mad love that Hajime succumbs to, and that renders all else in his life meaningless, at last delivers him to a state of purity. His passion -- itself a form of recovered innocence -- is all consuming; he is willing for it to be annihilating.

But, as with the fairy-tale couple who are no longer able to recognize each other after long separation, Hajime and Shimamoto are also incapable of resurrecting the lost perfection of their youth. There is only the empty, endless expanse ahead, from which there is no escape, not for anyone. ''The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward,'' Shimamoto tells Hajime. ''Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.'' This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths, but perhaps this is its most essential one, unbearable though it may be to contemplate.