I first stumbled across this book 4 years ago at my school library, and since then, I think I've revisited this book too many times to count. I found so much comfort in it, especially through Murakami's poetic descriptions of the mundanities of life in cooking, cleaning, weather, daily rituals etc. I love how slow the first book is specifically. It feels like I'm living by Toru in those simple daily rituals of his. The historical stories strewn about the book have followed me in the same vivid ways that they'd been described to me for the first time. I'm really grateful for them. Murakami was one of my first detailed encounters to Japanese history and has done a great job at educating me on it too, however disgusting those realities of war were in Japanese history - it ended up inspiring me to enter dozens of wikipedia rabbit holes. I think this truly is Murakami's magnum opus. His surrealistic and symbolic style merging with that of the raw and familiar depictions of life harmonise so melodically in this work is arguably him at his best.

i loved this so much more than i thought i would by the end. Nothing really happens, its just a collection of events from a character's life in an unorganised and sincere way, kind of like carrying someone's life around with you, and thats kind of comfprtung in a way. I really like kawakami's way of describing minute details of things throughout the book, its kind of a reminder for myself to pay attention to these things in my own life too. But the one thing that kawakami detailed best in this book, and what i find that the whole premise of this book is, is the struggle of humans attempting to forge connections with eachother. The fact that all the chapters are named after each object that is introduced to the nakano shop, and how objects in themselves have human stories attached to them. And the fact that the whole story is set in a thrift shop too?? Its all just an attenpt to understand and know humans, regardless if that is ever understood or known, because this is the struggle we ourselves face every day, and knowing that those stories and lives exist in those objects is beautiful in itself, even if it remains a mystery. This continuous attempt to understand and want to have these connections regardless of their futility is what this is all about. God i could talk forever about this book.