With my short attention span and curiosity, I copped this from work. I am usually against the "sampler" type of book, but I tried to take it more as "short stories" and I really did not want to dedicate myself to murakami and his plethora of books, but I did want to discover what all the hype was about. I am glad I checked this out. Not only did I find out what books I did not care about reading, I found a bunch that I want to check out, and my goodness is he a great writer. So really every story in here has been interesting and extraordinary, with the exception of the first part of the lieutenant story from the Wind up Bird Chronicles, which I think I will not pick up, but the second part that mentions the skinning alive of a soldier and the details being thrown into a well and pissed on was alarming. I don't think I'll be a Murakami ultimate fan so I'm into the mixed bag of stories in here. Really, he seems to convey something different in each story, and it seems you really can't get the gist of him from one stinkin' novel.