Product Description

An eclectic, eccentiric and altogether brain-bending new collection of short stories from the cult Japanese author.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1299 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Waterstone's Books Quarterly
'an engaging, likeable collection'

Sunday Telegraph
'The stories are delivered with a beguiling mix of grace and
succinctness'

Guardian
`each [story] is like an exquisite haiku'

Customer Reviews

short stories led long thoughts
Various strange but thought provoking collection of short stories that I really liked and could not stop reading once I started. These short stories appear to be a bit strange collections on the surface but each story provided a deep message made me think through. My favorate one was the kidney shaped stone that moves every day. All stories are beautifully wrtten with very soft touch to heart but this one was the best for me which I had to read twice. Also aroplane and spagetti were very touching. I recommend this book to anyone who likes to think about facts and elements of life deeper.

Short story collection up to Murakami's usual standard
This is Murakami's first proper short story collection in English since The Elephant Vanishes. After the Quake, though also a collection of short stories, is more of a coherent work, whereas these two collections draw from stories published from all periods of Murakami's career, and from many different collections in Japanese.

The publication dates of the stories are not given and, as Murakami says in his introduction (a nice touch), many of the stories have been significantly revised since their first publication. Thus, there is little coherence and tracing the author's development of style and themes is almost impossible, even with the aid of the bibliography in translator Jay Rubin's very interesting biography/literary study (also published by Vintage).

Murakami's short stories are very good, sometimes excellent, but it is in the sustained brilliance of his novels where his true value as a writer lies. The stories in here are, on the whole, up to Murakami's usual standard.

As in his novels, truly bizarre and unexplainable occurs in these stories. The most bizarre here is a talking monkey hiding in the sewers of a Tokyo suburb, but this is only one example. The more I read Murakami, the more I think this mystical, seemingly meaningful, content actually means nothing at all. This only marginally lessens its interest and mystery, though. Maybe one day I'll change my mind and be able unlock these conundrums (`like Zen koans', as one of the characters in this collection notes).

Throughout Murakami's work, a regularly re-occurring theme is things going missing without any explanation. It's no different in these stories. Sometimes it's things (name tags), often men (stockbrokers), usually women (girlfriends). Like one of the stories in The Elephant Vanishes, some of the stories here are the seeds of the writer's novels, fragments of them in a slightly different form.

Masters of the short story like Dahl, Fitzgerald and Hemmingway warrant a 5 for some of their collections, but there just isn't enough depth in these stories to warrant that kind of credit. They are like beautiful little sketches whose greatest power is to evoke a mood - nearly always one of wistful sadness - extremely powerfully. Don't expect them to mean anything, though, because they probably don't.

Marvellous Murakami
I don't normally like short stories, but this is an excellent collection and a great introduction to people who have never had the pleasure of reading Murakami before. (Athough I have). Nothing is as it seems of course but even the most mundane of events are written and described so well, whether it's a `detective' hanging around an apartments stairwell or a couple eating a delicious crab meal. I found myself wishing my journey to work was longer so I could finish off a story - not something I wish very often! Some of them (no make that all of them) are totally bizarre but each and every one are written in such a way that you can't help becoming engrossed and even spellbound by them. My favourites I think are Hunting Knife, Man Eating Cats, Nausea 1979, Where I'm Likely to Find it and Haneli Bay. Other stories such as Dabchick and A `Poor Aunt' Story left me shaking my head in confusion and laughter. If anyone is interested my favourite Murakami novel is Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Enjoy!