As the author’s new short story collection is published, we consider the relevance of his writing today.

In this time of constant distraction, never-ending emails and political unease, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. What you really need is a safe place with limited Wi-Fi coverage, where you can sit and collect your thoughts. Such as the bottom of a well.

If you’re familiar with the work of Mr Haruki Murakami, there’s a good chance that this unlikely location served as a gateway into this author’s off-kilter otherworld. First published in English in 1997, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle follows an out-of-sorts man tasked with finding his missing cat. The man, Toru Okada, is unemployed and fills those empty daytime hours while his wife is at work by making spaghetti and listening to jazz. He skulks around the neighbourhood in search of their wayward moggy, encounters a few colourful neighbours and ends up seeking serenity in a dry waterhole on the lot of an abandoned property nearby. As you do. Both the out-of-sorts man and the missing cat are reccurring themes in Mr Murakami’s books (several felines even strike up a conversation with the protagonist of 2002’s Kafka On The Shore). But the question in this particular case is who is mislaid: the cat or the man?

Mr Murakami’s latest collection of short stories – his first for a decade, out this week – is called Men Without Women (a nod perhaps to Mr Ernest Hemingway’s collection of short stories of the same name, published 90 years ago). The title suggests what the people who aimlessly amble through these pages, and many of his stories beyond, have in common. They are all lost, but they also endure loss and, by enduring it, become less complete in themselves.

In one story, when a middle-aged actor’s open relationship shuts for good, he regrets never asking his wife what she was looking for outside their marriage. And having spent so long playing other people, he’s not entirely sure who he is supposed to be himself. Elsewhere, another Mr Murakami man stumbles in on his wife having sex with his best friend and, rather than confront the pair, begins an entirely new life running a jazz bar in another part of town, where you suspect the only customers will be other Mr Murakami characters like him.

You sometimes wish that these lost souls could all meet up in a place such as this. After all, they have a lot in common, even if they are unlikely to talk about it. For each, the departure of the character’s significant other only highlights a yawning loneliness in their own lives that was there long before the woman in question turned up, let alone left. They have withdrawn from wider society, but found nothing in themselves to replace it.

The overwhelming feeling in Mr Murakami’s books is that every protagonist, as well as existing in his own isolated bubble, cut off from the world around him, but that this world is somehow cut off, too. The fictional landscapes in which the author dumps his characters bear a passing resemblance to reality, but each place is, to some extent, disconnected from life outside his books – as well as his other books. These backdrops range from the humdrum of modern Japan (which itself can prove dizzying to a Western audience), as captured in much of Men Without Women, to overlapping realms of magical realism, where talking cats appear unremarkable to most residents.

At one end of the spectrum is Mr Murakami’s breakout novel Norwegian Wood, one of the books said to be the closest to his own life. This story’s narrator, Toru Watanabe, recalls his time at university in Tokyo during the student unrest of the 1960s, but seems too wrapped up in himself – and, inevitably, the disappearance of his girlfriend – to pay much attention to the social upheaval going on around him. At the other, further even than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka On The Shore, is Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, where half of the story follows a government-sponsored operative who uses his subconcious to encrypt data (written in 1985, it still sounds farfetched now). And that’s the more reality-based portion of the book; the other half is set in a mysterious town that turns out to be inside his mind, where the narrator learns to read residual dreams from the skulls of unicorns. Or perhaps Mr Murakami’s more recent three-book epic 1Q84, which follows a man and a woman who have physically stepped into a parallel reality that’s an unsettlingly, subtly twisted version of their own.

For anyone whose world has been shaken (or, indeed, galvanised) by the political events of 2016 and 2017, or who is finding our increasing dependence on (and distrust) of the digital world has made everything seem a little unreal, Mr Murakami’s fictional universes seem especially poignant. At moments of social change, fantasy is often the genre of literature we turn to, to make sense of where we are. It’s why Mr Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was reappropriated in the late 1960s, a century after its publication, as something of a tripped-out spirit guide for drug use.

Meanwhile, as millions worry about the future, the books flying off the shelves include Mr Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ms Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Mr George Orwell’s 1984. But perhaps the dystopia we’re living through is more closely linked to the eerily modified universe of 1Q84, or the worlds of Men Without Women, where characters are finding different ways to distract themselves from an inescapable sense of emptiness. (Hello, Instagram.)

Part of the experience of contemporary reality is feeling surrounded by people, but strangely disconnected, a sensation that, if Men Without Women is anything to go by, will continue to be uniquely expressed in Mr Murakami’s work. You don’t necessarily need to have this in mind as you read his latest tales of drifters, absent women and, yes, missing cats. A good book is itself something to get lost in, somewhere to hide. A well, if you will.

Men Without Women (Harvill Secker) by Mr Haruki Murakami is out now

Keep up to date with The Daily by signing up to our weekly email roundup. Click here to update your email preferences