Customer Comments

What a strange, unsatisfying book! Well-written with a story line that kept me coming back, day after day, hoping for some understanding. Wildly unconnected and mystical (even scary) story lines are woven in, promising never a boring moment. An author who could place each twist and complete the puzzle in the end would truly be the genius reviewers say Murakami is. Almost nothing pulled together in the end, and though we did finally find out what happened to Toru’s wife, her rationale for leaving was WEAK. After years of heroic championship of his beloved missing wife, Toru ends up alone, then lies to and abandons his only real friend at the end, in an unexplainably wicked way.

Character development in this book is powerful enough to keep me fascinated from the first page to the last, though the story lines hold their own. The book begins with a foreign French jongleur and a dark and stunning English witch who cause scandal and uproar at a hanging. It takes the entire book and two subsequent generations to work out their story. At the center of it all, Kingsbridge Cathedral slowly rises, and pulls the lives of its parishioners out of the muck of the Medieval era. As the walls reach for the sky, so, too do the aspirations of those nearby, which causes not only joy and prosperity but too often misery, ruin, and death.