The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

I finally finished reading this book. I think I started it during my flight to Japan. For the longest time, it was just sitting on my bed table, picking up dust as I bore through more interesting books. Then finally, because I don't like things left unfinished, I decided it was time to finish it. It's not that it isn't a good book. In fact, there were times when I read chapter after chapter without realizing it. But there were also a lot of parts with extensive reflections and/or descriptions that were not as easy to read and so my reading advanced veerrry slowly. Page 164... page 165... page 165 and a half... you get the idea. I should mention though that it was the perfect book to read before going to sleep. Just interesting enough so that I was motivated to read it but not so interesting that I'd stay up all night reading it. After a few pages my eyelids started to close.. and voilà, that was my signal to close the book and fall asleep.

Now about the book, more specifically about its content lol. It's the weirdest book I have ever read in my entire life. Weird because there are many elements of the story which seem to happen only in the characters' heads. And there are "things" that happen, but these "things" aren't given a name, and we can only vaguely imagine what they are. So to say the least, it was weird. On the author's Wikipedia page, fiction, surrealism, and magical realism are listed under genre. Which maybe gives you a better idea of what I mean. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. I started reading it because a Japanese friend of mine back home told me Haruki Murakami was her favorite author. I was looking to immerse myself into Japanese culture so I brought two of his books along with me to Japan. One down, one more to go! After that, if I want to read more of him, they have plenty of his books at the bookstore.