Based on a Murakami story, which I haven't read - in fact, I don't know if it's available in English. I liked it, which obviously wasn't true of everyone in the audience - I noticed about half a dozen people leave at various points, and there were probably more - and suspect that coming at it as 'a film based on a Murakami story' helps, for it allows one to fill in a lot of the gaps as well as to be a lot more forgiving of how slowly it moves.
One key aspect of Murakami's work which the film conveyed really well was the all-pervasive loneliness and the sense of the gaps and missed connections between people - the theme was pretty explicit from the get-go, and the way it was rendered 'felt' right, down to the way that contingent and partial happiness is nonetheless possible in places. I thought that the characters really looked and behaved like Murakami characters (the way that their motivations are sort of opaque and yet their actions and interactions somehow familiar), and the way the film was shot, like a series of chapters, was also effective. Overall, it was kind of faintly dreamy while at the same time being very much grounded in real life (or at least the approximation of it that most, if not all, of us are living) - again, very Murakami.
Missing were the madcap elements and any outright fantasy, and had they been present, Tony Takitani would've been a rather different film. Something of that effect was obtained by the way in which some of the lines of the voiceover were delivered by the characters, in character rather than overtly metafictionally but nonetheless in a sort of space where it seemed that any other characters who were around the speaker at the time didn't hear their words, which struck me as both profound and, on occasion, funny.
See, it's not a depressing film as such - or, at least, it didn't seem so to me, though I can see how some might respond to it in that way - but its worldview isn't overwhelmingly positive either. I suppose that it corresponds pretty well to my own perspective, and so it seems truthful to me, which is why I like it.
