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.