69: Sixty-Nine

"In 1969 we were seventeen. We listened to the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Bob Dylan. We read Rimbaud, played guitars, smoked pot, fell in love, reveled against the establishment, protested the ware in Vietnam, barricaded our high school, and produced the first rock festival in our home town - a small city in a remote southwestern corner of Japan. . ." By turns hilarious, cynical, frivolous, and poignant, Sixty-Nine is infused from start to finish with Murakami's relentless energy and optimism; it simply refuses to get tedious, preachy, or "literary" for a single moment.