Haruki Murakami has a knack for coming up with mysterious concepts and weird but fascinating characters, but in this particular book, I felt like the plot  — despite being full of interesting things  — was all over the place, as if he had no idea what he was writing about and only penned random (but awesome) ideas on the page. The Wind-Up Bird is still among the more fascinating books I’ve read, but I had a hard time getting invested in the personal struggle of the characters when it felt kind of, well, random and inconsequential half of the time.