[january] i checked this out after watching the movie based on the story topaz. ryu murakami is also a director and i appreciate how cinematic his stories are, i can literally see the movie as i'm reading them.

full disclosure i read most of this on the treadmill and ~6 months later, i don't remember much of it besides the story "penlight". that story is probably my favorite depiction of a personality disorder i'd ever read and i related to the headspace of the main character. murakami went much too far with this story in a way that dampens the story's strengths, but ultimately it's open to interpretation enough that it doesn't come off as total torture porn.

i know this author is widely known for his coming of age stories in japan but the coming-of-age section was honestly pretty bland to me, i think he excels mainly in writing about aberrant behavior. his descriptions of such behavior come off as so precise that i wonder if he studied psychology at some point in his life, but it doesn't read as overly clinical.