Falling in love in 1960s Tokyo. Love with complications.
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost 20 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 marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
It is in this haunting story that Murakami tackles for the first time the themes of first love and the search for identity in an impersonal modern society which have informed his subsequent fiction.
