Haruki Murakami’s latest collection is magical. There’s something here to please both fans and initiates of the bestselling Japanese writer. While a previous (fiction) collection, ‘After the Quake’, was inspired by the Kobe earthquake, this book’s two dozen short stories are closer to the tidying up of loose ends that went on in ‘The Elephant Vanishes’; there’s work in ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ that goes back 25 years, the odd tweak notwithstanding.
We have a strangely menacing tale about a woman who wants to see a baby kangaroo at the zoo, and another about a man who discovers he has a ‘poor aunt’ attached to his back. ‘The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes’ is a capitalist satire that reminded me of David Foster Wallace while ‘Tony Takitani’, about a lonely man who falls for a woman who wears her clothes very well, is the unlikely source for an intriguing film.
This compilation is a must-have for fans, but also highly recommended to those looking for something different from the short story, as well as anyone wanting to find out what the fuss about this Murakami guy is anyway. These slivers of oddity are as successful as his celebrated novels: the central characters here tend to be more normal, it’s just that very weird things happen to them.
|
|
|
|
|
|
