Like in all Murakami stories, something unusual happens to ordinary people in ordinary settings. The atmosphere is friendly, intimate even, but alienating. For instance, in "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova", the narrator explains that - in his youth - he wrote a review of a Charlie Parker album that did not exist. Until so many years later he finds a copy of exactly that album in a jazz record shop in New York. Murakami's love for music, and then especially jazz and classical music is omnipresent in the book, and one story is about a Beatles album.
The weirdest story is possibly about a speaking monkey (no spoiler alert - the story basically begins with this), and even if this is highly unusual, as the narrator will tell you, it also appears not to be surprising or disturbing either. The narrator and the monkey have long conversations. The actual unexpected event happens later in the story (and I won't tell you that).
It is fun, it is deep too, despite the mundane and ordinary contexts. The stories are about 'what makes life' and 'what choices do I make in life' and 'who am I actually in this weird place'. Murakami's light and elegant style, his repetitive presentations of options to be decided, are actual challenges for the rationality of our thoughts, about probabilities and plausible things. He makes us wonder why things - and people and animals - are what the are and what they might mean to us (or him, as an individual). And by doing this, he is also sufficiently the literary craftsman to make it captivating, to keep the attention going, putting the reader for the dilemma to speed up things to know what's going to happen next, or to read very slowly and relish his beautiful dialogues and sentences.
It is surely not one of his major works, more a kind of in-between publication, but any Murakami fan will enjoy this one too.
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