An earlier book by Murakami. Like all his books, the plot is continually unraveling out in left field somewhere. A mix of daily grit and occult with some parallels to Greek mythology thrown in - Hades, trips to the land of death. The characters are unusual well- developed. Especially the old man, Nakata, grows on you - in his mental simplicity, he has almost a Zen character. The nominal theme would seem to be about the search for identity and the sense of self, but there are other threads - nature of time and death, the act of reading, the shallowness of most social constructs we live by.
Worth a reread.
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