The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami)

I liked this, kind of a lot. That is, I was expecting to love it, so my experience of discovery while reading this book was compromised. Although Murakami is widely read and liked in the Western world, I feel that his writing is thoroughly Japanese...within this bizarrely amusing (and quite accessable) story set in a quaint modern Tokyo, are fragments of a more profound level of Japanese culture...symbols and ideas that have come up in my explorations of Zen and Butoh. Many interesting things are tied together. Ultimately, it's a book that provokes a good deal of spiritual thought, and often through very viscerally disturbing passages. I cringed more than a few times, and I don't cringe often while reading. In the end, I think it's worth the effort.