i want to be generous because there are some moments here that made me reminisce about moments lost to words, encased in an amber-case of memories tucked deeply inside my brain, preserved for all eternity as a testament to some kind of thing—but i have to be honest, this felt overwrought and almost too self-righteous. every other page, it seems as if murakami’s trying to tell you something while simultaneously congratulating himself for telling you something. it feels like pretentious wankery laid over what could have been a genuine show of human emotion. five hundred pages that could have been intimate and honest but instead what we have here are words that just amount to nothing that tries to be everything cloaked in nothingness. just as some ancient traditions have postulated that there’s turtles all the way down, in this book there’s nothingness all the way down.