The latest Haruki Murakami novel, as of writing. You can read a hook description online, but this novel unfolds in a somewhat surprising way, so I find it hard to describe without spoiling. My spoiler-free review just consists of saying that I found this novel to be weaker than other more recent novels, and suffers from same of the odd pacing at progression problems of some of his older works, especially the early (1985) Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Nonetheless, the novel does manage to pull off a very satisfying, steadily pleasing emotional simmer after a rocky start. The crisp warm writing makes this book an easy recommendation for some happy reading.
The novel splits into three parts. In the first, we alternate between a realistic narrative involving a teenage love, dreaming about a fictional town, and a parallel fictional realm inside of this town, where an older protagonist meets his lost love, who doesn’t remember him or the real world. He is tasked with reading dreams, and learns about the weird inhabitants of the dreamy town. The two narratives are a bit disconnected, with the love story and the dream story unfolding somewhat separately. Where they connect is when we learn how his lover doesn’t feel like she belongs in the world, and feels like the shadow to her real self inside the dream town. At this point the connection between the two narratives is linked. A little bit of the story of their love, particularly how they fell out of touch, remains to be told. In the meantime, a larger climax in the dream town takes place, wherein the protagonist learns about the sickly condition of the shadow he had to abandon, and ends up deciding to flee with it to the outside world. In a last minute change of heart, the protagonist decides not to leave with his shadow, sending it alone to the real world, and him staying in the dream world.
Nonetheless, we go back to the real world, following the protagonist in what is basically a classic murakami novel, involving a lone male protagonist bacheloring around while encountering some kind of magical element, a surprising amount of Jazz, and conspicuously placed love interests.
This ties back in the to the first part only as we go through a dream like sequence in which a special character appearing in the latter half of the novel replaces the protagonist in the dream world, this character feeling much more at home in the dreamy town.
I think my criticism would be that the first part of the novel spends a lot of padding time in very unpleasant dream sequences, which can be hard to get engaged with. The second half of the novel is a much more pleasant read though, with clearer progression. The consequences of the first novel feel too unreal, with progression not really moving in any way. In the second part, events do happen, even if it’s meaningful events at the micro level, like shifting taste in drinks, skipping time, things like that.
The latter half is a great read, but it just fails to really connect to form a great novel on its whole.