Tweet, tweet.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a zen book. Believe me, I know how stupid that sounds. But, bear with me; that's the best word I could think of to describe the experience.

It's by no means an easy book to get through, both for the flaying and the mystical reasoning that leads the protagonist from one set of events to another. But, if you can suspend the critical, solidly-logical bits of your mind for a while, then there's a lot of beauty here, in both phrasing and imagery. I actually marked pages that have particularly beautiful passages on them; I never do that.

I found the ending more satisfying than any book I've read in recent memory. I want to describe it as meaty for some reason. It may have been because I'd been awake for something like 32 hours at the time, but I teared up when the well was revived.

I want to go on about what I think Murakami was trying to say about contemporary Japan, but I'm not Japanese. I know very little about the culture, and I'm fairly certain I'd come off sounding a bit like a stupid American. But, it's a lovely, lovely book that was well worth the time it took me to read it, which was around six months. I'm slow.