Okay, so first off: here's Mitchell, a white British guy, writing a book set in Japan, intentionally as homage, or in dialog with, or riffing off of, Murakami and especially Norwegian Wood. I think he got most of the details right, and I didn't know he lived there for awhile! But still. It's not exactly appropriative and it's not exactly derivative, but it does feel a little bit like he's trying to prove that he can out-Murakami Murakami (or perhaps criticize him by taking his tropes into the territory of the absurd?), and then bombard you with clever references and in-jokes. So that felt a bit weird. Especially coming to this book having read all of his later works, and knowing that he has plenty of original ideas and is a very talented writer.

I liked the first half or so a lot. It was especially fun to run into Mitchell "multiverse" references that also showed up in Utopia Avenue (the black and white movie and the weird cinema! whoa!). But, as the book progressed it really went off the rails. I found the last couple of chapters aggravatingly incoherent and the ending deeply dissatisfying.

There were also gory bits that I did not, personally, enjoy.

So many interesting plotlines were set up throughout the novel, and none of them had any payoff whatsoever. Instead, the book ends with the creation of a bunch of new, unresolved questions. Are we supposed to take some kind of meaning away from that? Like everything is essentially meaningless? Was this all a dream? Do I need to go reread Norwegian Wood in order to figure out what it is you're trying to prove here, Mitchell? Am I just too dumb to understand whatever meta-commentary is happening here?

A segment from the Guardian review, which I enjoyed, and which gets at why I still count Mitchell as one of my favorite authors:

Far more successful, because less overt, are the enjoyably arrogant dabs of intertextuality: one character and one secret facility from Ghostwritten wink tangentially into life here too, and contribute a pianissimo counterpoint to Mitchell's leitmotif. His guiding thesis is a comfortingly simple one: everything is somehow interconnected, even if we don't know why. This theme is most obviously celebrated in the novel's obsessive numerology. As though it were intended as a cyborg updating of the medieval dream poem Pearl , number9dream is everywhere infected with viral nines. Partly because of this suspicious arithmetic, it becomes possible to suppose that the entire action of the novel may have been a dream; Mitchell's greatest feat is to suggest this without making the reader feel cheated.

(I did feel somewhat cheated, though. As if he never meant for me to get emotionally invested in the characters or plot, and was then mocking me for doing so.)

I haven't seen anyone point this out yet and I just think it's kind of interesting. "Ai" means "picture" in Japanese, so Ai Imajo is twice-indicated to be, perhaps, imaginary.