I have read this novel nine times. I stopped counting after the ninth, which is itself a kind of answer. What I notice now, in a way I did not notice at twenty-eight, is how little happens. Two people almost traverse a corridor. The book takes three hundred pages to not do that.
Murakami understood something few novelists understand: that the reader will do the emotional work if you leave them enough room. He does not write longing — he writes the room longing takes up. The longing itself is the contribution of the reader. The book is the architecture.
I am thirty-five. The novel is still thirty-seven, which is the age of Toru when he narrates it, looking back. I have now spent longer than Toru has on the far side of the events in the book. This changes the geometry of the reading considerably.