reminds me of some of the criticisms against Murakami, who is also pretty international.
Several of his novels do feature a man with a cat, and several novels feature distant women. But if I remember correctly, the only other married narrator is the protagonist in South of the Border, West of the Sun, and there is a character in 1Q84 who is married and divorced.
To say that the plots of any of his books have exactly the same plot would be a huge mischaracterization, though. The only two books that are even vaguely similar are Wind-Up and the earlier Dance Dance Dance (the last part of a quadrilogy about the "Sheep Man"); the latter feels a lot like a preliminary sketch for the vastly superior Wind-Up, in particular the fascination about hotel rooms and shared dreams. But the plots are completely different.
I recommend trying Wind-Up again. The first ~100 pages are difficult to get through at times (the narrator is infuriatingly apathetic), but one you get past that, it's an incredible page turner. I liked Kafka a lot, but Wind-Up is his masterpiece.
You started out, perhaps, with other goals, but you've become tied up in explaining how and why everything happens.