This isn’t my go-to genre, but some of Murakami’s prior works have stayed with me for a long time, so I picked this one up without knowing anything other than the title and cover image. 

It’s driven by both the characters and the depth of the concept of character. It seemed to draw a bit from Jungian psychology (but without the darkness of the shadow) and poses some philosophical questions around love, truth, and the metaphysical world. 

I enjoyed the first two parts but felt as if the third part was a forced way to tie up loose ends. That said, I had a good enough experience with the journey that I don’t necessarily begrudge the destination. 

This book was such an undertaking and is probably the slowest book I've ever read, but I stayed with it, despite how much it rambles on and on, because of it's bizarre and compelling concept. This book is an allegory that blurs the lines between the real and the imaginary, the physical with the immaterial, through one man's unending search for the girl he loves in a town that lies at the edge of reality. 
The strangeness and eccentricity of the setting is very Murakami-esque, but the writing also fell flat often and I'm questioning whether it needed to be as long as it did. Still, I found it to be a quiet and cosy read, that creates this tranquil feeling of sitting by a still and peaceful lake.

Really enjoyed the character development of the protagonist. Part 1 felt slow-paced, then part 2 and 3 really picked up and kept my attention. 

A strange slow Japanese magical realism tale of obsession and loneliness (with shades of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks"). The slow meandering style takes some getting used to - but if you give it the time you may find it utterly absorbing as I did. I'm not sure I'm keen on the ending, but that may be because I didn't want it to end.

The plot, which I won't spoil, is very much open to interpretation - how much of it is real, and what "real" even means is all up for grabs. One word of advice - in magical realism books it's easy to take any given opinion as fact on how the world you're reading about works, but that's not the case here: trust your gut instead and it will make a lot more sense.

This is the sixth or seventh Murakami story I've read. I started with Kafka on the Shore, adored it, and have been steadily inching through his corpus ever since trying to find the ones which bring me closest to the feeling I had when I first picked Kafka up. So far, this one has been closest to that for me. This isn't a very precise review because it's more of a personal note for myself, but I was very delighted to recapture part of that feeling. The main reasons it doesn't have five stars from me is because I don't think it has the same re-readability to me as other stories of his (like, surprise surprise, Kafka...) and even when it's at its most toned-down, there's always something in his narrators' casually sexualised perspective on every single woman they encounter that gets a little bit under my skin. Compared to other works of his, I don't think that element is very prominent in this story at all, but it exists nonetheless.