The City and Its Uncertain Walls
A Novel
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
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Narrated by:
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Brian Nishii
About this listen
From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.
"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.
Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.
"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,306
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,152
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,153
Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws listeners into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Human Wonder and the End of my Patience.
- By Kindle Customer on 01-08-20
By: Haruki Murakami
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Norwegian Wood
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: John Chancer
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,337
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,043
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Story4 out of 5 stars 2,049
Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Sorry, but I didn't like the narrator.
- By Kelly McCarty on 10-30-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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1Q84
- By: Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin - translator, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, Mark Boyett
- Length: 46 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 10,745
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9,460
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Story4 out of 5 stars 9,436
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question....
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5 out of 5 stars
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WOW, WOW, WOW.
- By Amanda on 11-06-11
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Rupert Degas
- Length: 26 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,479
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,871
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 4,869
In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful book, flawed narration.
- By REBECCA on 02-08-14
By: Haruki Murakami
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Killing Commendatore
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 28 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,646
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,387
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,379
In Killing Commendatore, a 30-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Masterpiece and A Good Novel To Start
- By Elif Kaya on 10-18-18
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Kafka on the Shore
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Oliver Le Sueur
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,434
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,806
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 4,799
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
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4 out of 5 stars
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What's better than Murakami? More Murakami
- By Dr. Curmudgeon on 04-11-14
By: Haruki Murakami
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Rental House
- A Novel
- By: Weike Wang
- Narrated by: Jen Zhao
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
By: Weike Wang
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The Teller of Small Fortunes
- By: Julie Leong
- Narrated by: Phyllis Ho
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 68
Tao is an immigrant fortune teller, traveling between villages with just her trusty mule for company. She only tells "small" fortunes: whether it will hail next week; which boy the barmaid will kiss; when the cow will calve. She knows from bitter experience that big fortunes come with big consequences… Even if it’s a lonely life, it’s better than the one she left behind. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more when a (semi) reformed thief and an ex-mercenary recruit her into their desperate search for a lost child.
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5 out of 5 stars
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What a great story!
- By Matt on 11-23-24
By: Julie Leong
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The True Story of The Coward Brothers
- By: Elvis Costello
- Narrated by: T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Rhea Seehorn, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 43 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4 out of 5 stars 42
The True Story of The Coward Brothers follows two musical brothers – one English, one American, both the illegitimate sons of dubious parentage who may, as they claim to be, "one and half-brothers" – perhaps a reference to the disparity in their height and relative talents.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Cute
- By NRo on 11-26-24
By: Elvis Costello
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国境の南、太陽の西
- By: 村上 春樹
- Narrated by: 宮沢 氷魚
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
あの日なら、僕はすべてを捨ててしまうことができた。仕事も家庭も金も、何もかもをあっさりと捨ててしまえた。
By: 村上 春樹
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First Person Singular
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 358
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 305
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Story4 out of 5 stars 304
From the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami comes a mind-bending new collection of short stories, all touching beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist. The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A Murakami novel ruined by the wrong narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 07-10-21
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Time of the Child
- By: Niall Williams
- Narrated by: Dermot Crowley
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 18
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 18
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Story5 out of 5 stars 18
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A slower start than This Is Happiness but then….wonderful.
- By Georgia Burns on 12-01-24
By: Niall Williams
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor, Ellen Archer
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 166
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 142
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 144
The 24 stories that make up Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman generously express the incomparable Haruki Murakami’s mastery of the form. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things for which we might wish. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit Murakami’s ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and entertaining.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fantastic, just like how all Murakami books are
- By MM on 05-05-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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The Serviceberry
- By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Length: 1 hr and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 92
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 85
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Story5 out of 5 stars 85
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Informative without being preachy
- By J. West on 11-21-24
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Shy Creatures
- A Novel
- By: Clare Chambers
- Narrated by: Lucy Scott
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 9
The London suburb of Croydon, 1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she’s an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor. One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist.
By: Clare Chambers
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Eric Loren
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 721
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 627
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Story4 out of 5 stars 632
Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime - beginning in Japanese - has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A River of Unmindfulness
- By Darwin8u on 10-12-13
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Brightly Shining
- By: Ingvild Rishøi, Caroline Waight - translator
- Narrated by: Jesse Vilinsky
- Length: 2 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall2.5 out of 5 stars 6
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 5
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Story3 out of 5 stars 5
Christmas is just around the corner, and Ronja and Melissa’s dreamer of a father is out of work again. When ten-year-old Ronja hears about a job at a Christmas tree stand near where the family lives in central Oslo, she thinks it might be the stroke of luck they all need. Soon, the fridge fills with food, and their father returns home with money in his pocket and a smile on his face. But one evening he disappears into the night under the pretense of buying Christmas gifts—and the daughters know he has gone to his favorite local pub.
By: Ingvild Rishøi, and others
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Underground
- The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin, Ian Anthony Dale, Janet Song
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 301
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 272
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 271
On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Just as you breathe, you dream your story
- By Darwin8u on 08-26-15
By: Haruki Murakami
What listeners say about The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Dakini
- 11-26-24
outstanding, his best
I really feel like this is a culmination of Murakami's entire career as a writer. A masterpiece.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Phyllis Akif
- 11-30-24
An Unparalled Storyteller
I have never read a novel by Haruki Murakami that I didn’t love. He creates worlds that envelope the reader so masterfully. Just as I love and admire Japanese visual artists, so, too, do I admire Murakami as artis
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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