DNF: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

It had been a while since I picked up a Murakami book. The way he wrote his opening prose almost always captured my attention — slow pace and immersive. Maybe I’ve read one book too many of his works, so I could smell the ending from a mile away. I was already unsure how I felt about the book that reads like a fanfiction between the narrator and… me? I had to quickly cast Byeon Wooseok as the narrator in my head. Twenty pages in, not even a handsome face could salvage the classic Murakami female characters that read more like an enigma and a figment of the narrator’s imagination, rather than real people. I do not know how it worked on me while reading South of the Border, West of the Sun and 1Q84, but the author’s book formula has worn off.

This might be the last book of his that I read.