Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

I really liked Sputnik Sweetheart, but this earlier Murakami was something of a let-down. Structured around a male student and the 2 women in his life (plus a whole bunch of less important but equally sexually available women) I couldn’t summon up interest in any of them.

The distancing was exacerbated by the strangely dislocated sense of time in the novel. Set around student riots in 1968, I kept finding myself wondering why nobody had mobile phones.