This book follows a 17 yo boy and his love for a girl. It gradually becomes clear that the girl might be a shadow or rather that her shadow is a person in a strange town with strange walls.
To enter this town, you must shed your shadow at the gate. Once inside, you can never leave(we can, on that later). The town is enclosed by a wall that supposedly changes shapes, and the story moves back and forth between this world and the protagonist's real, everyday life. Time is meaningless there.
The protagonist somehow enters the town in search of the girl and finds her though she's still 16 while he's nearly 30 or so. He takes on the role of a dream reader in the town library so he can meet her (they also do something to his eyes as he takes on the dreamreader's job)
In the real world as well he works in a library (deep in mountains), there he meets Mr.Koyasu (won't divulge further).
I started to see this as a kind of parallel reality,almost like when someone falls into a coma, they might end up in this town. If they come back from a coma, they return to actual reality. This reminded me of the K-drama Light Shop, where people enter/find themselves in such a town (please watch this kdrama if you have time, it might feel boring to someone who watches romedy or so).
Ok I digress, so it's not quite the same. Here, you make a conscious decision to leave the town and go to the other world, and it mostly happens while you are asleep. Eventually, the protagonist leaves the town with the help of a boy who consciously decides to stay, believing it's his destiny to become the dream reader.
The book fell short in a few areas. It never fully explains what happens when the real self reunites with its shadow after emerging back into the world. How does the boy in the yellow submarine parka know he's meant to become the dream reader? And what happens to the girl's real self if the one in the town is just a shadow or vice versa?
There's also reference to Beetles, a recurring thing in Murakami's novels.
Basically, this book deals with parallel universes (if that's what one can call) and the conscious will to move into another reality instead of the current one. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars. I even thought about DNFing, but then I decided to just get through it (Started picking up after 80+ pages).
Thanks for reading!
by ruminatingpoet