Haruki Murakami's novels have much in common with potato chips. Both are often addictive and both are often ultimately unsatisfying. Yet one can't help but buy another bag of chips at the supermarket and another Murakami novel at the bookstore. Such is his appeal.
Potato chips contain few surprises, and the author's tales are at once predictable and surreal — an anonymous narrator, whose knowledge of jazz and classical music approaches that of the idiot savant, chronicles the minutiae of his daily routine of brewing coffee, drinking beer and making pasta while mulling his alienated state. Then he gets a strange message or urge and embarks on a bizarre quest, involving mysterious characters, for some trifle like a pinball machine or an odd sheep. When the adventure is over, there is no grand resolution. In the end, his musings tend to hang together like a line of laundry drying in the wind. And that's that.
Until the next bag of chips.