That novel showed a more historically and culturally engaged author. Still, the strain that runs most clearly through Murakami's work lies within its murky, reflective nature. His pyrotechnic narratives are punctuated with navel-gazing, and his more unassuming stories are filled with the inscrutable, rendered like a confessional through mirrored sunglasses. Murakami has always been concerned with the strange, unfathomable darkness that he believes lies within all humans. We are caught in our little labyrinths, always blocked, but we are also windup toys, going through the motions of everyday life.
Life is very simple and yet strange.
The signs are everywhere, and the trick is to gracefully accept it. She had a point there. And it is the careful mapping of a kind of existential romance with life and the death within it that makes this book so wonderful. As hard-boiled as the existential can seem, Murakami knows that it always hides as much sentimentality as a greeting card or daytime melodrama. Your life and your death are defined in how you meet them.