This is geeky cyberpunkish science fiction, not terribly serious or edge-pushing, but a decent, savvy vision of the near future in which mobile communication and surveillance technology and online gaming has progressed even further in a logical fashion from where we are now. It's gone to the point where national intelligence agencies are using games in various ways to conduct espionage and information warfare while businesses are earning and staking considerable funds in and from virtual worlds. <br/> <br/>The action is pretty quick-paced and interest is held competently without being unrealistic narrative. One form-related complain is that the book is written in 2nd person viewpoint, which I always hate.

Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite novelists, although at some point I stopped reading him when his work went from the wonderfully surreal and bizarre to more staid and slow tales of middleclass mid-life crisis. However, this book, one of his more recent, returns to the fantastic embedded in the real. In fact, reading this book makes me realize that Murakami's work is sort of like a Japanese version of magical realism. A mostly &#34;normal&#34; world, but peppered with never-explained strangeness. No science-fiction rationale, like the director's cut of Donnie Darko giving us a quantum-physics way to believe the insanity, ever ruins the delicate ambient wonder. And with Kafka on the Shore there's even a somewhat happy ending.

This is a great book. Heady and hilarious, the best mix. <br/>And having just been to a lecture by the real person the book is about (who was one of my teachers at CalArts 13 years ago), i sort of now want to read it again.

This is a funny, irreverent novel about death, mainly, and also about life and society and class and the screwed up world we live in. The book is written in a sort of over-the-top, &#34;gonzo&#34; style along the lines of Mark Leyner, Douglas Adams, or even a bit of Hunter S. <br/> <br/>The jokes keep coming even when people are being fired, driven insane, humiliated, or killed. I do have to say that the plot and premise (that God and Satan run their domains according to free market capitalism and that God has a unique afterlife scheme that involves a sort of weird temporary reincarnation) kept me turning the pages and reading along at a fairly quick clip.