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The book left me a bit confused
The first half has no real target for what happens in the book. As I understood, the author aimed for a written version of what is called a fugue in music. The lead「私」is on vacation in some mountain village, where he already has been before, to write the novel the reader is currently reading, and to better his health.
For the latter he starts out on some walks into the surroundings of the village, and essentially repeats the same four(?) ways (-> the parts of the fugue, I guess). There he encounters several things, like flowering bushes, water, kids running around, something falling on his head, and many more, but on every way or each time he walks the same way, things happen with slight variations. This is an interesting endeavour in itself, but also actually leads nowhere, though you can for sure like the vivid descriptions of nature, the people and the village.
In the second half the lead meets a girl and becomes exclusively concerned with her, showing her around (thus walking the ways again), watching her from afar while she is painting, always wanting to be together with her, but not wanting to be seen with her by everyone, all in all a slightly weird and complicated behaviour.
The book is not as difficult as I thought. E.g. my 8.1 look-ups per page for vocab and grammar were not more than I had for コップクラフト 3 | L35, that I read mid of this year. Rare and old kanji have furigana, so I didn’t need to check many of them.
BUT I only read like 11 pages per day, which is a definite minimum for non-manga books in this year. The difficulty lies in long winded sentences of 10+ lines (columns), which came up everywhere, sometimes including memories of when he was there before, and then you have to notice the moment, when he talks about the present again. I got used to these streams of thoughts with time and later reading got easier, but nonetheless. Luckily there were commas…