This digital document is an
article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction
on September 22, 1999. The length of the
article is 650 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com
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Hajime, the middle-aged narrator of Murakami''s new novel, begins his story completely convinced of how average he is. His was, he allows, "a 100 percent average birth." The town where he grew up was "your typical middle-class suburbia.... Some of the houses might have been a bit larger than mine, but you could count on them all having similar entranceways, pine trees in the garden. The works." Although...