This was by far the best experience I had with Murakami. I could see these characters being real people. If not for everything else but for the fact that their pain is very real. I also think this is one of his stories that genuinely benefit from being ambiguous. After all, don’t we all know how ambiguous love is? It is ambiguous enough in one person and the impossibility of acquiring a holistic understanding of it is already a struggle enough, but once your very confusing and messy feelings get jumbled with everyone else’s equally confusing and messy feelings, you are done for. Your world shakes and continues to swirl on and on until it doesn’t, and then you don’t know why, you never really know when either, but it stops and you move on.