His readers might recognize his signature touches—affectless narration, illogical plot turns, strangely dispassionate sexual encounters, all brought to life via a suite of signifiers with an unarticulated personal meaning, such as the many references to music, baseball, cats, cooking, and so on—but they belong to Murakami. (That said, the English novelist David Mitchell’s Number9Dream comes thrillingly close to Murakami, maybe the most successful work of literary fan fiction ever published.)