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Summary: Me and Murakami
Review: One of my favourite Japanese writers. There is no one else who can write about loneliness the way he does. Murakami's collection of stories is simply superb! I was struggling to find a good blip from this book, one that will give a proper sense of Murakami's style and material. It's a problem, because when I pick something out of context, it sounds plain and ordinary. If I pick something from his dream-like sequences it sounds kitschy. This would be messing with the impact of his stories, which aren't even close to being simple or over-cute... Profound is a better description fo Murakami's work, and mystic in an urban, understated kind of way. The Washington Post Book Review says (on the book cover) that Murakami "takes big risks." and one can see why they might say that. My strong impression is that fully half of his stories are drawn from his dreams, and you know how wonky dreams can get. His work often takes a sudden shift, or it stops, without full resolution. But it's okay, dangling bits can add to the richness of a good story. The story titles are quite illustrative:
-The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women -Sleep -The Fall of The Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and The Realm of Raging Winds -The Little Green Monster -TV People -The Dancing DwarfAside from these dream-like stories he's got more matter-of-fact ones (see more titles below). One of Marukami's strengths is that he can write a story almost as one tells one in conversation, starting with the bit that made you think of it in the first place, mentioning 'real life' asides and in the process including the reader in a subtle and complex experience.
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Summary: A stunning foray into the delightfully absurd
Review: One of the best collections of short stories I have ever read. Period. Stop what you are doing right now and read this book from cover to cover. Then start all over and read it again. Murakami's prose gives his characters (all too often numbed by whiskey and isolation) a deceptive simplicity. Especially entertaining is "The Kangaroo Communique." Murakami is also quite adept at the macabre with his thoughtful "Barn Burning." Murakami, truly a wizard with the magic of words
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Summary: Beautifully preposterous masterpiece from a brilliant writer
Review: Over the course of the last year or so, Murakami has propelled himself into the upper echelon of my taste in literature. I really love his work. The absolute confidence with which he writes his absurd yet profoundly beautiful novels has caused me to truly love sitting down to read one of his books for the first time. There was no difference with this book. I absolutely loved this collection of stories. Normally I just read through a book and let whatever thoughts I have process and fade away with time. With this book I absolutely had to write down my thoughts. The stories in this book are brilliant. The anonymity of the characters and surrealness of their settings are so great that they really grasp the essence of the purpose of the stories. His themes and metaphors are really poignant through his lack of other purpose in the stories. So stripped down and raw in physical story and purpose, yet so laden with internal dillema and character development, these stories are unique in such a way that only Murakami could have written them. Thus I love them. If you're an avid reader of world literature or just like a good, odd story, this is the author for you, and in my opinion this is the place to start with him. I would even recommend reading a story out of this at the book store. While I have declared Haruki Murakami as one of my favorite authors, others may find his work a bit intellectually oppresive and because of this I think it's important, especially for a jaded american audience to get a little taste of what you're getting before you buy this. But definately try it out. You don't even know what you are missing.
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Summary: Thought provoking and somewhat surreal
Review: Some of the short stories in this book are insightful, while others are surreal. These stories touch on themes involving relationships, fate, and our own self-image. Give that these stories are translated from Japanese, it is interesting to see how familiar the characters and the settings feel. Is this a reflection of the homogenization of cultures, or is it a reminder that we really are more similar than our cultural differences suggest? These stories have many layers of meaning that can be used for analysis.
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Summary: A Must-Read -- Literature as it should be
Review: Sometimes you start to read a book but you'e not ready for it. You should scrap it and pick it up again later in life. Any people (I specifically mean negative reviewers) who dislike Murakami should scrap reading him now, put his books carefully on the bookshelf and take one down during the next phase in your life because Murakami's incredible. His writing is boiled down so far it is like a truffle. The essence carries far more mass than the thing. I saw a review that chastised his stories for having little plot. This to me is like being upset your PC isn't also a telegraph machine. You cannot look for plot in his stories. If you want action-adventure look elsewhere, but to suggest that there is no plot in his work is unfair. There certainly are plots, they are mostly based in emotion rather than action and are even surrealistic at times but they exist and they are riveting. In the story "Barn Burning" plot is nearly impossible to see until you finish the story and think about it -- but I would not dare suggest that this story lacks a point, direction, or entertainment. It's one of the best stories in the book and it only functions completely when you finish. Perhaps, Murakami forces us to reconsider what goes into a plot. They certainly are standard plots but this doesn't make them any less compelling. I think plot is overrated. Whoever thinks this book lacks plot also must think that Seinfeld is really about nothing. What is most striking about Murakami's writing is how strange, smart, and unique his characters are. There is such style in their meanderings. These characters are 'bored but never boring' reads one piece of praise inside the jacket. This could not be truer. There are many great stories, and sure some may be on a lower level than others, but this should not stop you from reading them. What pulls you into his writing is the deep emotional yet intellectual viewpoint of the characters. Each one is lovable in a zany, almost impossible and certainly improbably, way. One last point, it is possible that you can learn more about Japanese culture from this book than from reading many history books or other material. This book deals with a range of issues in its bizarre way while never sounding moralistic or at all attacking. It is a pleasure to read.
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Summary: A book of short stories with a provocative perspective
Review: The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York, 1993, 327 pp., $21. (hardbound) Haruki Murakami achieved, in his first collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes, a rare and delightful mingling of universal motifs emanating from a Japanese perspective. His popularity in America is probably best understood because of his refreshing simplicity, yet complex pragmatism, sometimes odd to the occidental mind, which permeates his stories. The book contains fifteen stories, and both Playboy and The New Yorker have published some of them. The tone and narration of the stories have a distinct yet similar quality to one another and portray honor, courage, death, insanity, and love with precise, yet foreign, perspectives. While the settings for his stories are decidedly urban and Asian, he seems quite at home with Western culture. He includes spaghetti dinners, Mozart, Macdonald's, and Herbie Hancock seemingly in one long melding together of a smorgasbord of Western icons. His ability to empathize with people , feelings, and concepts, in spite of the narrator's apparent confusion about life, brings to mind the old Peter Faulk character, Columbo. His search for meaning in darkness, such as in the story "Sleep" which has a young mother struggling with extreme insomnia and the subsequent questions that arise, concerning the meaning of love, marriage, offspring and mortality point to the out of balance nature of a mind that has not rested. The paranoia and brittle makeup of sanity as exhibited in his story "The Second Bakery Attack" exemplifies Murakami's simplicity. His young married couple holdup a McDonald's for 30 Big Macs in order to free themselves of a curse. In the "Barn Burning" he has a man recklessly confessing to burning barns in order to keep himself balanced. Ultimately, when attempting to arrive at the meaning of the concepts behind the words we read, (or write), we have to ask ourselves about the perspective the narrator has assumed. It is in the nature of Murakami's character's perspectives that we catch glimpses of Murakami. We readers who are American, are intrigued and mystified by those glimpses.(SP
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Summary: stories by turns eerie and funny and touching
Review: The Elephant Vanishes is a grand collection of short stories from Haruki Murakami. They vary in length, from a few pages to 30+ pages, but they all bear the Murakamiesque stamps of eerieness, humor, and compassion. In the title story, an elephant vanishes from a public enclosure, as does his keeper. It seems like a simple mistake; couldn't his keeper have just stolen him, and left town? Couldn't the elephant have run away, and the keeper is just searching for him? (these occur to the reader, but they're not offered by the narrator or a character...) But towards the end of the story, our narrator offers us a few bizarre details. Yes, the elephant vanished all right. And he knows it vanished. Murakami's description of this is amazing. Other stories involve a late night robbery of a fast food restaurant (of food, not money), a man on the last day of his lawn-mowing job, and a woman who witnesses a small green monster emerge from the soil of her front yard. One of my favorites involves a woman who has gone weeks without sleep. She reads Anna Karenina at night. During the days, she lives as she always did, and her husband and son are oblivious to her insomnia. A very strange fate befalls her. If you've read some of Murakami's novels, but you haven't read THE ELEPANT VANISHES, you owe it to yourself to give this book a chance. The stories are just great. If you haven't yet read Haruki Murakami, this collection is actually a pretty good place to start. ken32
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Summary: these stories will make you a Murakami fan
Review: The first story in Murakami's brilliant short story collection is one of the best in this incredible display of ingenuity. These stories with their Western/Japanese cultural mix still manage to cut to the core of our deepest emotions and experiences. Murakami is definitely different, but it's worth reading his whole oevre starting with these stories because many of his larger symbolic and thematic ideas stem from here. By the time you graduate to the Wind up Bird Chronicle, you'll feel like you have a better grip on how Murakami thinks and explores complex relationships.
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Summary: Engaging, addictive stories that are always bizarre.
Review: These short stories are gripping, I could hardly put the book down. They are nonsensical, but in a perfectly reasonable way, life is very odd, and in this way Murakami's work is reflective of our times. If you read Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and not this, then don't be surprised that the first short story is pretty much the first chapter of that novel.
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Summary: murakami at his best
Review: these wonderful, slightly odd stories are gems of modern dislocation, yearning and worry. while friends consider murakami's prose too "simple", these ease of these translations show depth and brilliant understanding. i always come back to these stories as a reassurance when reality gets too strange.
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