Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Second Murakami since the summer's started (I don't have much to say about After the Quake, I like my stories longer), feels similar to Norwegian Wood in both the subject of loss and the big role that a piece of music plays in the story.

My BGM for this book. Now I've found the complete first year, so currently listening to that and different performances of the jazz piece (love the opening notes) that was also mentioned in the story.

I don't have much to say about this book either, but there's quite a few quotations that stood out to me, either because the content resonant with me, or because of his very peculiar way of describing things.

Something...comforting:

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

It's a remarkably happy ending compared to the opening sentences. The opening did immediately captivate me, but that's more because I enjoy reading stories about loss.

I really should have died the , Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one I. The here and now, wouldn't exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The current world wouldn't exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist - just as this world would no longer exist for him. 

But even if had dreamed, even if dreamlike images arose from the edge of his mind, they would have found nowhere to perch on the slippery slopes of his consciousness, instead quickly sliding off, down into the void.

Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch.

Whatever the truth was, I didn't think it would save me.

How much of this is real? he wondered. This wasn't a dream, or an illusion. It had to be real. But it lacked the weight you'd expect from reality.
[...]
but he woke up once more in a dream. Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free. 

Dreams always play a big role in Murakami's stories, which is interesting because I feel reading his books are like dreaming. In contrast, I'd describe Vonnegut's books as darts.