This was a little bit of a slog to get through, I think it might have worked better as a short story. It did raise a lot of interesting philosophical questions as Kawakami is really good at doing, and also had some really beautiful writing at times. I don’t want to critique the underdeveloped characters because that’s sort of Kawakami’s thing to use characters as vehicles for her philosophical explorations, which usually I don’t mind. From a reading experience though I just found this story a little bit flat and tedious to wade through.