Why is Haruki Murakami so popular?

The question should probably be: “Am I misunderstanding Haruki Murakami’s popularity?”

I’m working through various Japanese texts for my thesis and have come across the inevitable Haruki Murakami, whom I’ve been avoiding for the past four years because of severely negative responses from professors and (almost annoyingly) positive reactions from (I hate to say it) quote unquote ‘non-literary’ or ‘lay’ readers of popular fiction.

Currently making my way through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, shrugging at the better parts and crying on the inside at the truly bad parts (which are mostly dialogue), and have read some short stories and couldn’t finish What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and I still don’t see why he’s adored.

He seems to have a formula or template for his characters, so that whatever he had to say when he started writing about middle-aged sexually anxious men trapped in a mundane life and then dragged into calculatedly quirky circumstances – if he was saying anything to begin with – has by now been obliterated by convention. The dialogue seems banal, or ‘tinny,’ as though he lifted pieces of it from uninspired network television shows. People seem to think he does this on purpose, but as far as I can tell it serves no purpose; if it’s not accidental, it still doesn’t accomplish anything.

The question, then: why is Haruki Murakami so popular?

Understand that I’m not being ironic or snarky or elitist or anything; I think I just don’t get it. Hoping especially to hear from @Jeruba because I know her profile has awarded Norwegian Wood a respectable B+, although that reminds me that Murakami’s convention of naming his novels after (Western) songs always seemed kind of silly to me.

Thanks in advance.