Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Anyone who has ever lost a friend and not known why can relate to Tsukuru Tazaki. The defining experience of his life is that at age 20 his four best friends, the people he considered an extension of himself, cut him off without explanation. Sixteen years later, their treatment of him still stings - it is the reason, Tsukuru believes, that he always keeps a distance between himself and others, that any future rejection will not cut so deeply. Spurred by a new girlfriend, Tsukuru strives to make peace with his past by visiting - unannounced and one-by-one - each of his former friends.

I have mixed feeling about this book. On the one hand, I read it in about two days, so I was obviously hooked. But I still can't figure out why. Tsukuru is not a particularly likeable character and the pages are often filled with minute details on nothing (this is a character whose single hobby is watching trains arrive and depart from Tokyo train stations). I also found the ending a bit maddening - perhaps the author was tired of his story and simply wanted to finish?

I have read other review that say, essentially, if you've read one Haruki Murakami, you've read them all. I can't say; Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is my first. What I can say is that the book is infused with a sense of "Japanese-ness." That is, the entire essence of the book is Japanese which is, I believe, what ultimately kept me reading and why in the end I still liked it.