A wild ride. Mysteries piled upon mysteries, but without the luxury of having any of them explained to you at the end. Reportedly, the English translation was heavily abridged - the original was published in three volumes. On one hand, the full text might have made more sense. But on the other hand, I barely managed to finish the book as it is.

Toru, the protagonist, is a cipher. A passive, passionless man who drifts through life, doing nothing of his own volition. (In the real world, anyway. In an alternate reality somewhere in his own mind he manages to have an affair and to kill a man.) He has no stories of his own, but absorbs the stories of those that he meets. And boy, are they doozies. Spies getting flayed alive in WWII in Manchuria, surviving (or not) the Siberian gulag.

I listened to an audio version, where the speaker did different voices for each character. And God did I hate the one he used for May Kasahara. All brassy Valley Girl. I winced when she had dialog. Or worse, when she wrote an entire letter.