Toru Watanabe, now middle-aged, hears a song and is transported back to his college years in Tokyo: his dead friend Kizuki, Kizuki's fragile girlfriend Naoko, the vibrant Midori who pulls him toward life. Murakami wrote this as a realistic novel, a departure from his usual surrealism, and it made him a literary star in Japan. The prose is clean and melancholy, the sex frank, the deaths devastating. Young people in Japan and then worldwide recognized something in its portrait of loss and longing. The Beatles song of the title plays throughout. Memory is a wilderness.