pineconek's Reviews (816)

I listened to this. Both the story and the style were good - nothing exceptional or memorable, but also nothing bad. I was traveling at the time and it was a good, relatively light book to keep me company.
I did enjoy the exploration of themes such as love, loyalty, and belonging.

I listened to this and it felt like a really long true-crime podcast/interview, and I loved that. I learned a lot about famous cases and appreciated the different perspectives that the author offered. It's definitely very detailed and personally biased, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I picked this book up when I went to Japan in November 2019 and was so excited. Thrilled. I love Murakami and this book was set near where I spent my favourite part of the trip (i.e. Hakone and Odawara, and generally around Fuji), what's not to love?
I wanted to love this book. I love Murakami's style, I loved reading descriptions of places I'd just visited and was now missing, and I love the "journey is more important than the destination" quality of his mysterious magic realism plots.
But oh boy. This dragged on. And on. And on. I think it would have worked with significant editing but, as it is, it doesn't hold a candle to other (wonderful) long novels of his like Wind Up Bird or 1Q84.

This book has two narrators and the audiobook version had two readers. I was frustrated with both of them for the first 2/3rds of the novel and was then absolutely enchanted by them in the end. This is a book about loneliness and vulnerability and is consequently both sad and beautiful.

I loved the themes and plot of this book but found the prose frustrating and struggled to get through it. I'm happy I read it but I also understand why multiple copies turn up in thrift stores all the time.

I wanted to like this book - I listened to it read by the author and, to his credit, he made for an excellent narrator.
That said, this book frustrated me to no end with tropes like deus ex machina, reveals of "he was dead all along!!", and epilogues of "I was secretly a sociopath". I love small town whodunnits because of the character studies and the fact that reveals tend to be simple and satisfying. This book fell flat on both counts for me and left me disappointed.