Wow. I don't usually go for snarky remarks like this, but you hit the nail on the head. It could be that he just realized he won't die a timeless author and curiously a Nobel most probably won't save him. A lot of past literature Nobel laureates are quite obscure and as it turns out - not that good after all.

In my personal opinion he's fairly strong at driving a narrative, but I never get to what end. Like a painter that works extremely hard at a masterpiece to finally pour some gasoline and set it on fire. Compared to an all star like Tolstoy for example he's just not cutting it even a bit.

I haven't read a lot of ""real"" Japanese literature but supposedly anticlimactic endings are appreciated there. I remember Kafka on the Shore having an especially bad one which I thought was very funny, he telegraphs an ending and then suddenly the book ends before it gets there.

But I do think too much of his writing is about the narrator meeting a series of mysterious women, not paying them enough attention and then pretending it's an ineffable mystery when they leave him. My favorite of his books is Hard-boiled Wonderland, where this doesn't happen. (There's an anime called Haibane Renmei whose plot is 100% plagiarized from that book.)