Not a truly complete answer but too long for a comment.
The short answer is no, your matrix will not have a unique solution for all $a > 3$. I cannot completely classify invertibility of these matrices in terms of $a$, but let me write what I have so far.
Note that your matrix $M$ is given by the difference $M=A - B$.
The matrix $A$ is the $(a-1) \times (a-1)$ "multiplication table" scaled by $a^{-1}$. For $a=5$ we have $A=\frac{1}{5}\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 \\ 2 & 4 & 6 & 8 \\ 3 & 6 & 9 & 12 \\ 4 & 8 & 12 & 16\end{pmatrix}$ Note that this matrix has rank $1$.
$B$ is the matrix of integer parts, i.e. $b_{ij} = \left\lfloor\frac{ij}{a}\right\rfloor$. The companion $B$ to the above $A$ is given as $B=\begin{pmatrix}0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 1 & 1 \\ 0 & 1 & 1 & 2\\0 & 1 & 2 & 3\end{pmatrix}$ Notice that this $B$ has $\mathbf{b_4} = \mathbf{b_2} + \mathbf{b_3}$ where $\mathbf{b_i}$ denotes the corresponding row vectors of $B$. Therefore this matrix has rank $2$. Now note that rank is sub-additive so $\operatorname{rank}(M) = \operatorname{rank}(A-B) \le \operatorname{rank}(A) + \operatorname{rank}(B) \le 3$ Therefore we have shown that your matrix for $a=5$ is non-invertible. Hence the solution will not be unique or even necessarily consistent. We can actually say a bit more.
The rowspace of $A$ is spanned by the vector $\begin{pmatrix}1 & 2 & \cdots & a-1\end{pmatrix}^\mathrm{T}$ while the rowspace of $B$ is always zero for the first entry. This means that the rowspace (and consequently columnspace) of the matrices are disjoint. It is a rather well known result that the rank sub-additivity reaches equality for matrices with disjoint column and rowspaces and therefore we actually have $\operatorname{rank}(M) = \operatorname{rank}(A) + \operatorname{rank}(B)$
You will have a unique solution if and only if $B$ as defined above has rank $a-2$.
This of course does not answer your question, but it is (perhaps) a cleaner criterion for checking invertibility since $B$ has integer entries. With this result, similar methods as above will easily show that the matrix is invertible for $a = 3$ and $4$.
Numerically, I have tested these matrices for $a \le 1000$. The only results for which the matrix is invertible is $a=3,\ 4,\ 6$. This is somewhat to be expected since we except at least some sort of linear dependency between the non-zero rows of $B$ as the number of rows increase. Numerically, the rank of the matrix tends to hover around $\frac{a}{2}$.
I would conjecture that your matrix is singular for all values of $a$ except $3,\ 4$ and $6$ but I cannot prove it. Perhaps someone else can take over from here.