elaine!

this book came for me in its exploration of like filial piety and guilt and regret um it was not necessary to hurt me like that mr. yu

murakami is kind of a weirdo if you think too hard about it but the magical realism in this book went hard asf. also it lowkey terrified me i don't know why but this book kept me up at night every night in the three days it took me to read it. similar to "the remains of the day" it then prompted me to binge more murakami (namely "kafka on the shore", which many people believe was absolutely butchered in translation and i think i would probably agree with that take if i could read the original) but i ended up sorely disappointed by the time i got to my third novel by him cus they are literally all the same novel. but that's ok this book is still one of the greats

the cognitive dissonance that the narrator experiences throughout the novel is SO chef's kiss and written so well by ishiguro that after i read this novel i literally bought every single novel he wrote and read those too