Was not expecting the mystery element of why Tsukuru's friends cut him off suddenly to be so gripping but it kept me turning pages despite the book's slow pace. And yet I also applaud Murakami for not drawing it out unnaturally, but instead just deepening the initial explanation with Tsukuru's every further step into his past. 

Many beautiful turns of phrase - often on the edge of purple prose too, yet Tsukuru was such an observant, detail-orientated protagonist that they never felt like the author breaking character to squeeze in a pretty sentence he thought of. Shocked at how I didn't even grow weary of the train station comparisons.

Along with his compelling imagery, Murakami also smoothly peppers in insights to the human condition that had me stopping to think in the middle of a paragraph. My favourite is near the end in the Kuro section where Tsukuru reflects (paraphrasing) that human hearts are not only bound by harmony but an understanding of each other's vulnerability, fragility, and pain. 

I was warned Murakami's writing had misogynistic elements but that assessment lacks nuance. It is clear Murakami cares for his female characters and spends time making them complex people. Unfortunately, he is still falls at the final hurdle due to an over-emphasis on the female body - for example, an emotional, meaningful hug is somewhat ruined by the bizarre choice to describe the woman's breasts as full of 'vitality'. Female characters are not reduced to their sex appeal, but it is disproportionately in-focus.

My issues with the narrative itself are that I failed to fully connect the subplots with the main one, and that the

ambiguous

ending felt like a cop-out. As much as I appreciate the character growth in

deciding he could survive Sara rejecting him when they met up

, the writing's tempo felt like it was building to that final confrontation rather than that moment of growth in and of itself. I honestly half-suspect Murakami just did not want to write it at that point. I enjoyed the subplots of Haida's father's story and what becomes of Haida himself but I kept expecting it to have literal relevance to the main plot - Haida or the sleep paralysis explaining some of Shiro's happenings, or the curse making a reappearance. I can see the threads of thematic relevance (and construe some tinfoil hat theories) but struggle to draw any additional insight or meaning from them.

Also, I wouldn't have minded if the pacing was just a little faster.