When he heard her favourite Beaties song. Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki, Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire-to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marched into his life and he had to choose between the future and the past

Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny, but then Murakami is one of the best writers around. This book by him is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging. and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows