As some of you know, I’m a huge, long-time fan of Japanese surrealist novelist Haruki Murakami, even having written a well-known parody of his work. Check out my review of his latest over at Partially Examined Life:

A typical Murakami narrative centers around an aggressively ordinary and largely passive hero who unexpectedly experiences fractures in his mundane existence that reveal a hidden, occasionally frightening, and often awesomely weird other world lying just under the surface of the one we know. Almost always there are mysterious disappearances and unexplained obsessions, both of which may go entirely resolved. (Murakami is not an author for those who prefer their endings tidy and without loose ends!)