I think I've written once or twice that at this point in my life I find Murakami's short stories more interesting and engaging than his novels, and I think this collection does a great job of exploring why that is the case: there's a real erosion between fiction and biography that happens in his shorter work that I find charming, and it works as an advancement of his thesis around the outer bounds of reality.

In partiular, even though I've read a handful of these stories before (three of them were first published in the New Yorker), I found myself enjoying them again and finding that they contributed well to a gestalt. In particular, the final three stories — one expressly fiction, one expressly autobiographical, and the final one, from which the collection takes its name, somewhere in between — a delightful Murakami moment.

★★★★