Reticulating Splines

It’s a pretty good meditation on the traumatic effects war has on the human psyche (and more specifically, the psyche of a sensitive Japanese man from the mid-20th century - a cultural paradox in itself), but the narrative starts to get redundant about halfway through, and practically of the ancillary characters feel interchangeable (though you could argue this is commentary on how war dehumanizes people, I just found it a forgettable aspect of the book). The conclusion is very weak and too drawn out, and I felt a lot of the original nuances and poetry of the text was lost in the translation (which is to be expected in Japanese to English as the languages are so different). There are some good moments and some truly fantastic imagery in this, but by the fourth or fifth time the narrator reflects on his existential dilemma and the horrors of war, I found myself wishing this book was about fifty pages or so shorter.