Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The above is a quote from this book, and well worth taking to heart. I take James Hillman's advice on dream images when reading a Murakami novel: don't try to unravel the underlying/hidden meaning, just stay with the images and let them move you and revel their meaning/feeling slowly. There are images in this novel that will stay with me for years. I'm a big fan and this is certainly one of his best novels, right there with works like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Like all those works, reading the novel felt like slowly sinking into a well of dreams, and being enveloped in a mood of curiosity and off hand beauty/absurdity. Some of the early reviews seem to be complaining about the book being repetitious, and the characters being too passive. All I can say is, this must be the first Murakami books you've read. This describes many of his books. The passivity of the characters is actually essential to this book which deals with a world bereft of meaningful stories, and people susceptible to meaning that gives the false impression of depth [cults in this case]. Repetition is a form of making real in Murakami. The meanings are in the images, the images often begin as shadows, the novel takes those shadows and through echoes like a jazz song it breaths life into them: sometimes quite literally as in his book Hard Boiled Wonderland. I love it, but someone not used to it might find it odd. As far as the more fantastic elements, I'll let Murakami speak for himself: "I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story--it's fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It's not easy to explain. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it's the real thing. But I don't. I'm not pretending it's the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment, it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about." - 2004 To me this captures what I resonate with in Murakami's fiction: finding reality in simple things[cooking, having a bear, off hand conversations, relationships, music, art, thinking] in a world that is surreal or hyperreal much of the time. Even the surreal when followed deeper always leads to more reality not less in Murakami, you just can't cop out along the way, like how so many other postmodern writers do, you got to go deep into the well to use a often repeated Murakami image. So overall, if you enjoy his works like me, this is a must read and a good time : If you've never read him, you might want to start with something shorter[I'd recommend Hard boiled wonderland]. P.S. The initial review was based on the first two books[UK edition], and now just having finished the third part [US edition] I can honestly say I felt satisfied with the ending. Murakami is very hit and miss with endings in my book, but this one worked for me. Also there are some great secondary characters here, my favorite overall might well be the private detective who shows up more prominently in the third book.