"When I finished trimming my nails, I made some coffee and drank it at the kitchen table, German book open. Stripping down to a T-shirt in the sun-filled kitchen, I had set about memorizing all the forms in a grammar chart when I was struck by an odd feeling. It seemed to me that the longest imaginable distance separated irregular German verb forms from this kitchen table." [Haruki Murakami. 2000. Norwegian Wood, p. 135.]

I've been reading Norwegian Wood on BART while commuting to and from my latest contract work, and it's alternately delightful and depressing. The protagonist, Toru Watananbe, is in his forties remembering his college years in the late sixites: friends, loves, sex, deaths. I read Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase a couple years ago, when a fellow instructor at GGU told me to read it, loaning me his copy. Murakami's style reminds me of a pomo-updating of the nouveau roman. With a depressing little heart.