Haruki Murakami is unique among contemporary novelists insofar as he has somehow managed to remain a cult writer while selling millions of copies of his books both in his native Japan and in the many countries where his novels are now read in translation. In February 2013, when the Japanese publication date of his latest novel was announced, the pre-order sales alone made it the fastest-selling book ever on Amazon Japan, where the first hardback edition numbered 300,000. On the evening before its release, queues began forming in bookshops in Tokyo and, a week after its publication, the book had been reprinted eight times, with sales of more than 1m copies. Though not quite in the Harry Potter league, a new Murakami novel is now an event.

As evinced by the use of his surname alone on this new book, Murakami is now also a global brand. What does that brand deliver that has made it such a worldwide literary phenomenon? And, more problematically, what impact, if any, does Murakami's huge global popularity have on his writing? Has the seemingly effortless invention of his earlier fiction become a kind of signature that now comes close to formula? The intriguingly titled Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage goes some way towards answering the first of these questions, but leaves the other two hanging in the air.

Essentially, Murakami writes two kinds of novels: the deftly delineated personal odyssey of self-discovery narrative – Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun (both 2000) – and the more ambitiously plotted, often supernaturally shaded, epic shaggy dog story – A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997). The latter approach, which incorporates elements of magic realism, science fiction and Japanese mythology, reached an apogee of sorts with his most recent novel, the three-volume 1Q84, which by turns mesmerised and baffled with its bewildering and, in places, disturbing plot. It involved a female character who wandered off a freeway into a parallel universe and a darkly mystical cult led by a self-styled prophet who indulged in creepy sex with the young female assassin hired by a mysterious dowager to kill him.

Colorless Tsukuru, perhaps as a reaction to the excesses of IQ84, falls into the first category, its relatively straightforward narrative centring on an archetypal Murakami character: a lonely young Japanese man whose life has been dislocated by a traumatic event he cannot make sense of. We learn early on that his emotionally empty, doggedly conformist existence is, in his mind, the result of his sudden banishment from the close circle of friends whose collective insularity had once given his life a meaning.

As always with Murakami, symbolism and metaphor loom large. Each of Tsukuru's former friends has a last name that contains a colour: the boys are called Akamatsu (red pine)and Oumi (blue sea); the girls Shirane (white root) and Kurono (black field). Thus, it transpires that even when Tsukuru was part of this tightly bonded group, he often felt like an outsider, his self-perceived lack of personality leading him to question constantly why he was included in their group at all. Outside it, he becomes even more "colourless", dogged by thoughts of suicide, but devoid of the energy to carry them through.

Instead, he lives a quietly ordered life as a designer of railway stations, his love life consisting of a series of low-key relationships that never quite lead anywhere. At least until he meets Sara Kimoto, a character who flits in and out of the narrative as Tsukuru's first potentially serious girlfriend, but whose curiosity about his odd past and oddly empty present is the catalyst for the retrospective journey of self-discovery he reluctantly undertakes.

In its singularly understated way, Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage, is, as its title suggests, a quest novel, though one without any dramatic epiphanies. This, too, is typically Murakamian. I had the lingering sense throughout that I had read this story before, or at least a version of it, so familiar were the characters, their ways of conversing and the abiding undercurrent of passivity that underpins their lives. They seemed, at times, close to stock Murakami characters, just as the supernaturally tinged story within the story that a passing character tells Tsukuru seemed to echo other tall tales from Murakami novels past. Even the viscerally sensual dream sequence – that may be some kind of astral visitation or psychic invasion – recalled the truly bizarre sexual interlude towards the denouement of 1Q84.

Once again, too, Murakami weaves a well-chosen piece of music – Franz Liszt's deceptively simple Le mal du pays from his Years of Pilgrimage suite – into the story to underscore the abiding sense of loss and melancholy felt by his protagonist. The jazz classic Round Midnight, played solo, Thelonious Monk-style, by a dying musician, also makes a fleeting appearance. Murakami's fiction constantly alerts us to his characters' – and his own – sublime taste. By now, too, there is definable sense of familiarity to Murakami's style, which, when it works, is as deceptively understated and unerringly effective as Liszt's seductive piano piece. Characters meet for dinner or drinks, sometimes sleep together, sometimes return alone to their solitary apartments, all the while revealing just enough about themselves to keep us interested in their meanderingly oddball existences. This kind of Murakami novel is like life, then, but less so yet somehow more so.

For all its familiarity, I read Colorless Tsukuru as I have read all Murakami's previous books, with the exception of the sprawling, often frustratingly tangential 1Q84: voraciously while, simultaneously not wanting it to end. Inevitably, Tsukuru becomes less colourless, less lost as the story unfolds. The big lesson he learns about living is that one cannot do it fully without risk – the risk of disappointment, heartbreak or, as he puts it, "getting lost in the dark forest".

What I learned is that, like other Murakami characters before him, Tsukuru seems to have grown older without really growing up. His discontents are essentially adolescent and one cannot help harbouring the suspicion that the majority of Murakami's vast global fanbase either recognise and share those discontents or are themselves adolescents. It may even be that he is the one writer who speaks most meaningfully to the in-between generations caught in a culture where youth is fetishised to such an extent that its values and myriad small traumas, as well as its styles and trends, can now be carried without embarrassment into middle age. As the book ends, his latest contemporary Everyman, still uncertain but no longer adrift, is poised on the brink of a new consciousness in which, as Tsukuru puts it, "not everything was lost to the flow of time".

When I finished the book, I searched on YouTube for Liszt's Le mal du pays as performed by Lazar Berman, only to find that countless others had already done the same. One post read "Murakami brought me here" and most of the others echoed that message in one way or another. Their satisfaction was as heartfelt and unquestioned as that of any true believers. As oddly satisfying as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is, though, it is perhaps time that Murakami shifted gear and brought his vast and adoring global readership somewhere else entirely, shaking up their preconceptions in the process. Now that would be an event.