Пинбол 1973

I enjoyed, but did not love, this book, the sequel to Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. As always, Murakami's prose is captivating, but his writerly vices are particularly pronounced. He has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for his treatment of women, and this book has the most egregious case I've seen, in which the narrator has a relationship with a nameless pair of twins who are literally indistinguishable. While the pinball plot was intriguing, mysterious, and surreal, the Rat subplot was utterly unremarkable, and seemed to have been inserted only to tie the book more closely to its predecessor.