“BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN” BY HARUKI MURAKAMI, TRANSLATED BY PHILIP GABRIEL AND JAY RUBIN; KNOPF, $25

Haruki Murakami seems fond of Hawai'i. He ran the Honolulu Marathon twice, in 1983 and 2002, and an early novel "Dance, Dance, Dance" features a couple who travel here. And though the 24 stories in his newest collection are either set in Japan or follow Japanese characters when they travel to other locales — Italy, Athens, Singapore, and yes, Hawai'i — three touch directly or indirectly on the state.

"Hunting Knife," though set in an unnamed setting, is a tropical place where "the night was deep, and time was pliable." There the narrator crisply observes a mother and her crippled son who "seemed less like a mother and son than an old married couple who had long ago grown bored with each other," and references an American military base and hotel, trade winds and plumerias. Although a Cinzano ashtray renders some doubt, these details seem to suggest Hawai'i.

"Tony Takitani" doesn't feature Hawai'i in any way and instead follows the life of a wandering jazz musician and his son, but it's a story that began when Murakami bought a T-shirt with the name emblazoned on it, while visiting Maui in the mid-'80s. A decade later he learned, as many kama'aina remember, that Takitani is a lawyer and former member of the state House, who lost a campaign for the state Senate.

"Hanalei Bay" is most specifically evocative of the Islands, and beautifully renders the rawness of a mother's pain after her son drowns while surfing, after being bitten by a shark in Hanalei Bay, Kaua'i. Since the mother comes back to visit three weeks every year, Murakami's own astute observations flow through her. They are observations not only of nature, as when the narrator notes "the cries of the geckos mingled with the sound of the surf," but about how things are in Hawai'i. The story notes hurricane damage to Kaua'i, remarking "nature could be harsh in this environment," and reveals that the mother, like many visitors and residents alike, "had to accept the things on the island as they were." Her meetings with young Japanese tourist surfers allows Murakami to expose Japanese misconceptions, including the assumption that everyone in Hawai'i speaks Japanese and it never gets cold.

In the mother's warning not to take ice, or crystal meth, the story makes clear "the age of Elvis is long gone."

Such nomadic characters are fitting voices for Murakami, a Japanese writer who has never quite fit in at home. In the fable-like story "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes," he addresses his outsider position in the Japanese literary establishment, "a situation" he explains in the collection's introduction, "that continues to the present day." This story and others that directly feature the author as a character, such as "A Folklore for Our Generation," have an unusual intimacy, making this first collection "brought out abroad in a long time," also perhaps Murakami's most personal.

Even though the stories retain his penchant for the bizarre and the mundane — leave it to Murakami to craft a captivating story about vomiting — and for leaving questions about life unresolved, they have a calm confidence that strikes deep. And though they include his oft touched on but never redundant motifs — jazz, piano, walking, swimming and, of course, pasta — and obsession with memory, illusion, loss, reality and storytelling, their balanced and touching humanity gives them flight.

The author admits that "everything I write is, more or less, a strange tale," and the stories in the collection range from his newest five to two of his earliest efforts: "A 'Poor Aunt' Story," which struggles with familiar themes but is inaccessible and sometimes tiresome; and "New York Mining Disaster," an intriguing but elusive piece about a friend who goes to the zoo when there's a typhoon and gets a new girlfriend every six months.

Both fit Murakami's own assessment that at the time of their creation, he "knew little about short-story writing then so it was rough going."

Most of the stories, however, focus on men and women who are 20, or at least in their twenties, an in-between and vulnerable age when young men and women are trying to find their place in the world.

"Birthday Girl" touches on the universality of the age, and of wishing, while others, such as "Dabchick," written in the early '80s, are just plain weird.

"The Mirror" is a simple clever story that asserts "the most frightening thing in the world is our own self," and "Man-Eating Cats" is a macabre stand-out wherein the narrator, in a taboo relationship with a woman and forced to flee Japan for Greece, "suddenly felt as if I had vanished."

"The Year of Spaghetti" showcases Murakami's playfulness, and the female narrator of "Ice Man," which was based on a dream of Murakami's wife, offers a refreshing perspective, as well as the truly haunting exploration of the notion of a continual present combined with a preserved memory of the past.

"Chance Traveler," one of his most recent stories revealing coincidences in life and how we make sense of them, is beautiful, gracefully human, and reinvigorates one's appetite for Murakami's writing to come.

It is an undeniably strong collection: varied, personal, and plentiful with seductive spaces the reader can surreptitiously inhabit. As the narrator in the title story says of his friend, so this book simply says of Murakami:

"The guy really (knows) how to tell a story."

Christine Thomas also reviews books for the San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune.