My first Murakami and I’m so disappointed. I’m hoping to try a different book from him because I’ve heard such great things about his writing. This one just… ugh. It was the first book in years I DNF’d because I gave myself permission to not make myself finish books I didn’t enjoy.

I’m honestly not going to go into the biggest issue I had with this book but after I started having issues with it I read some reviews on here and found even more reasons to dislike it. If you want in depth details on these issues I suggest some of the other well written reviews already posted. Suffice to say for me, I was most put off by Murakami’s writing like he had insight into things he either had no actual knowledge of or intentionally misrepresented to steer the reader into feeling a specific way about specific characters which to me felt very slimy. If you want to make a fantasy world go for it but to skew real things and real people to manipulate a reader’s feelings towards them for the sake of a novel doesn’t sit right with me. I’m sure there will be the argument “that’s the point” or “it’s about the duality and alternate reality, it’s not ‘real’ in the way we think of reality” and fine, have your argument to that effect. But to me it felt like manipulation and twisting of the truth and in doing so doing a disservice to real people who have actual life experiences in this realm.

To each his own but I had no desire to get past 1/3 or so of this book and I don’t regret quitting it.