Holy Murakami

I just started reading Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, one of those books that's been on my shelf for a long time, and I'm deeply impressed. Several laughs-out-loud, a few wonderful sentences, an engaging main character. Stuff like this:

"She needed something more noticeable. But I couldn't think of anything. Which is not to say that I didn't have any distinguishing characteristics. I owned a signed copy of Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain. I had a slow resting pulse rate: forty-seven normally, and no higher than seventy with a high fever. I was out of work. I knew the names of all the brothers Karamazov. But none of these distinguishing characteristics was external."

The Times has the book's first chapter online, as well as lots of other material on and by the author.