Once again, Murakami is up to his old tricks, thinking lofty thoughts about how lives translate into narrative, and how narrative gives shape to life, and what happens to human experience, desire, and identity when you eschew History (where time marches forward, with regularity, in waking life, in individuated consciousnesses) for a different set of narrative rules. His grand-schemed playfulness in this novel reminded me powerfully of the Matrix trilogy. As a work of literature, it's not transcendent like The Wind-Up Bird chronicle, but it's compulsively readable for a novel about such Big Ideas, and outstandingly intelligent for a summer page-turner.