I was in the kitchen, boiling a pot of spaghetti, and whistling along to Rossini when the question hit me: why do I no longer read Murakami? A quick scan of my bookshelves would suggest he's pretty much my favourite author – there are at least 10 novels, more than Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, John Updike or Margaret Atwood. But he isn't. In fact, he's a long way from it. Why not?

It wasn't always thus. There was a time when, fuelled by a glass of wine, I would attempt to wrestle any discussion round to the subject of which was the finest Murakami novel. But my obsession actually started, like one of his tales, back in 1999, during a trip across Japan. Travelling to Kyoto on the late train, after a weekend in Koyasan, I fell into conversation with a bearded man who recommended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. "Here", he said, thrusting me a tattered English copy (he was from Brighton, not Kobe). "Have mine. It weighs a ton in my rucksack anyway."

That night, lying in the coffin-like confines of my hotel capsule, I enjoyed the taste of the surreal (mysterious phone calls, enigmatic women) that so perfectly seasoned the opening's suburban concerns (detailed preparation of food, marriage problems, missing pet). The following day, with my flight delayed at Kansai airport, I tore through another couple of hundred pages.

But it was the UK publication, in 2000, of Murakami's only realist novel, Norwegian Wood, and its themes of loneliness and alienation, that left me evangelical. I bought it for friends and family with the shrill instruction: "It'll change your life!" (Although I wasn't sure how). As Harvill published more and more titles, I would advise Murakami virgins to "start with" the slim novella, South Of The Border, West Of The Sun, before enjoying the classics and then graduating to the SF-infused "more difficult" earlier works (A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard Boiled Wonderland, Dance Dance Dance). And now people started to give me Murakami books as presents: the critical study (Murakami and The Music of Words), the short story collection (After Dark), the lesser novels (Sputnik Sweetheart) and so on.

Last week I pulled out Norwegian Wood from the top shelf for the first time in years. What had I once loved so much? I wasn't sure. So I tried chunks of Wind-Up, and half a dozen others. In contrast to recent re-reads of The Great Gatsby and Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, these books left me, not cold, but a little indifferent: they may play on the invisible threshold between realism and science fiction – but for me it had become a concrete wall.

It's not the ever-modest Murakami's fault – his flight from Japan after the success of Norwegian Wood makes you wonder if he himself considers himself a little over-rated. It's just that his surreal tales about lost souls, with their inevitable choices between two different women, rather blur together.

So was our love of Murakami, like sushi bars, no more than a passing vogue? John Wray, who interviewed Murakami in 2004 for the Paris Review, offers an answer. "Murakami's world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiar symbols – an empty well, an underground city – but the meaning of those symbols remains hermetic to the last. His debt to popular culture notwithstanding, it could be argued that no author's body of work has ever been more private."

It's in Norwegian Wood that the narrator sums up my own feelings: "All that flashed into my eyes," he says at its close, "were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere." Exactly. Now, am I alone here (in my own mysteriously empty well) or has anyone else fallen out of love with Murakami?