Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Woolly got me this book by Haruki Murakami for Christmas, probably in return for the fact that I introduced him to the Takeshi Covacz series by Richard Morgan. To say that I was impressed is an understatement. Thinking back, I don't think there has been a single Japanese author I've read who hasn't impressed me, but I suppose that is not surprising since I've read very few and they're supposed to be the cream of the crop. The translation for Wonderland is fantastic. I don't presume to know whether it captures the style of the original Japanese, but it does have a style. The book is wholly engrossing and very hard to put down. The sci-fi bits are the dumbest, while the little pithy analyses of everyday things are the best (for instance the bit about couches, or the bit about how people can be split into two categories according to the breadth of perspective). I'm left wondering whether the whole unicorn fixation on Boing-Boing has anything to do with this book...