Rating: 
Summary: A different type of book...
Review: This book is a random collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami, translated by two people. Most people who read stories that have a definite plot (with a beginning and an end) might find the stories in this book slightly unnerving. The author does a great job of building up the plot to a climax and has an annoying tendency to just end it there or have the story eventually go nowhere. Almost none of his stories have a resolution or denouement.A couple of the stories I liked are:
* The Perfect Girl
* Family Affair
* A Slow Boat to China (particularly the third section about the second chinese in)
* The Elephant Vanishes I find it curious that of the millions of names the author could have chosen for some of his characters, Noboru Watanabe is used twice. The other stories are just borderline fantasy and ramblings. The translations are crisp, clear and colorfully written. I'm sure it does the author's original work justice. The author writes in the first person voice for all the stories. Sometimes, the protagonist is male, sometimes female. Most of the stories have the protagonist as a married person. Almost all of them come to a realization that their spouses aren't perfect and they hate them. None of the wives ever have a name. In the stories where the author writes in the voice of a bachelor, he always has a steady girlfriend and other acquaintances to have sex with. Every protagonist drinks beer and smokes. After a while all this repetition becomes boring and ultimately unpallatable. LEAP rating (each out of 5):
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L (Language) - 4.5 (crisp, clear and colorfully translated)
E (Erotica) - 0.5 (first short story had the inklings of phone sex)
A (Action) - 0 (n/a)
P (Plot) - 1.5 (and that applies to about each short story)
Rating: 
Summary: Staredown with the Postmodern World
Review: This is a very solid collection of stories that 'fit' together very well. But for practical reasons, I'm just going to say a little bit about each rather then the book as a whole. The Wind Up Bird and Tuesday's Women- The reason I bought this book. It's obviously an early working of the first couple chapters of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. It's very interesting to read, to see murakami's plans for his epic start to bud. And like that novel, it is an excellent piece of writing. "The Second Bakery Attack"- Great story that furthur elaborates on Murakami's view of the Absurd, which, needless to say is, well, more ABSURD than the absurd of Camus. I read somewhere that Murakami is picking up where Camus left off. I think this is a great view. Murakami is Camus if he had lived in the Postmodern era. "The Kangaroo Communique"- Vintage Murakami weirdness, with a touch of creepy love. "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning"- My personal favorite story in the collection, if you can even call it that. It's a beautfifully written piece on melacholy lost love to the circumstances of the world that none of us can see or control. Reminiscent of Sputnik Sweetheat, Norwegian Wood, and South of the Border, West of the Sun. "Sleep"- The most disappointing story. Not because it's bad. On the contrary, it's one of the best in the book. But it is crying out to be a novel. Like the first story, it seems quite possible to able to carry it out for a few hundred pages. Unfortunetly it ends with a quick, unsatisfying ending. "The Fall of the Roman Empire...etc"- Interesting. I'll just leave it at that.... "Lederhosen"- Intriguing little story dealing with individualism to the very group minded Japanese. "Barn Burning"- The most mysterious story in the book, about a writer who meets someone who claims to burn barns. "The Little Green Monster"- My least favorite story in the collection. Not up to Murakami's normal greatness. Interesting, if not anything original, is all I can say about it. "Family Affair"- Another great, personal story by Murakami about the obligation to mature. "A Window"- Forgetable, but enjoyable when reading. "Tv People" Scathing story about the insidousness of Television. "A Slow Boat to China"- A very interesting story about Chinese in Japan. I think, though, that only people with some grounding in Japanese culture would appreciate it. "The Dancing Dwarf"- Most likely the most insane story in the history of mankind. "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon"- Another story about the difficulty of love and human connections. "The Silence"- A wonderful story wherein Murakami defends the Everyman and laments the over achiever. "The Elephant Vanishes"- Good, but not great. Also forgetable. All in all, this collection shows the whole breadth of Murkami's writing abilites, and is not something to be missed by any of his fans.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful postmodern urban surrealism: similar to R. Carver
Review: This is perhaps the best collection of 20th/21st century urban short stories I have ever read. Murakami's ability to create compelling characters in just a few paragraphs, and place them in absurd situations, is unrivaled. Murakami is right on par with Raymond Carver, maybe even more challenging and interesting -- since Murakami's story premise is more often absurd and surreal, unlike Carver's "around the house and in the yard" focus. But the clipped sentences, the meetings of strangers, and the very self-aware male narrators, are quite similar. "The Kangaroo Communique," which appears in this collection, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of short fiction -- and it actually reminds me more of Borges than of Carver. It is about kangaroos, and customer service at a department store, and stalkers, and the nature of self-representation.... well, just read it. Thematic similarities between Murakami and Carver: lapses in communication, people just missing each other, chance encounters between urban strangers, etc. One major difference between the two writers is that Murakami is always in awe at the (sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes cruel) beauty of the world, while Carver tends to border on the morose. Personally, I much prefer Murakami's stories to the one novel of Murakami's ("Hardboiled Wonderland") that I read -- his succinct, slightly neurotic, slightly dreamy first-person style is (in my opinion) best suited to the short story form. Overall, these are exquisite short stories, perfect for the age of chance meetings, lonely drifting souls, and cyber-disconnectedness.... If you like these stories, you may also like Murakami's very imaginative and inventive novels. (I prefer his short stories, but that's just me.) For fans of clever, self-referential, semi-surreal short stories similar to Murakami's, I'd highly recommend the short story anthology "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges.
Rating: 
Summary: Very weird. . .
Review: This was my fourth Haruki Murakami book I have read, and of the four it was my least favorite. The only reason I believe this book to be my least favorite is because I enjoy nove length tales more than short stories. The storis in this book range from heart warming to extraordinarily odd. My favorite stories from the book were "The Bakery Attack" which dealt with a young couple holding up a McDonald's, "Sleep" which dealt with a woman who could not fall asleep for a very long period of time and how she spent those extra hours given to her life, and "Family Affair" which is the story that seems most down to earth of the collection and makes one think of Norwegian Wood.
Rating:
Summary: Postmodernism in The Elephant Vanishes
Review: Weird and stunning as it may seem, The Elephant Vanishes, resembling the author's other, longer fictions, is a constellation of short stories told in the mainstream way of contemporary literary writing: postmodernism. This notion realized, it should thus be not difficult why the narrator and his wife in The Second Bakery Attack has to commit the illegal action, the purpose of which is other than money nor the hamburgers themselves. Their action symbolizes the author's rejection of and hostility to society, the prevalent social systems, wherein individuals are bound by inhumane rules, regulations, disciplines and the like. This component of a larger theme is also apparant, commonplace in other stories in the book as well as in other works of Haruki Murakami, in which the protagonists are often recluses or individualists consciously escaping the more collectivist activities and those common-minded, conforming people, who don't have deeper sense of what they are doing or what the world is. Besides the attack of the modern, compressing society, the author situates his denial of modern rationalism in such sentimental stories as On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, The Elephant Vanishes and The Silence. Take the first said story as an example. The narrator meets on street a girl who is, as the story suggested, 100% perfect, and actually does also view the former the way as he does. Yet they end up passing from each other's sight forever even if they are perfectly liked by each other and in factuality, added the author on purpose, were lover long, long before. Why do they have to have such a sad ending? Is there any meaning beneath the design? The answer is positive. Though perfectly compatible, when they were still youths, they rationally made the decision, after a mutual contemplation of the seemingly rational wonder if "it(was)all right for one's dream to come true so easily", that they would break up to test if each other are perfect for each other, and if yes, it was strongly believed that they would marry after a destined re-meeting. They do see one day and feel the same as ever before for each other, in the end. But they have already forgotten everything past and therefore they made no actual attempt to strike up anything. If they had believed, the author seems to imply, in the their affections for each other instead in rationality, highly praised by prevailing modern societies, they would have made a perfect couple. Up to here, one should be able to understand Haruki Murakami's idea: trust your feeling instead of blind rationality. Which many postmodernist thinkers(e.g. Michelle Foucault)have suggested. Perhaps the utmost topic, and element of postmodernism is the idea about on truth. And it is surely one the author does not leave aside. Rather, the challenge of absolute truth is omnipresent in the book, not to mention others. The person self-claimed but never proved to be a barn burner in Barn Burning, the mother of the narrator's friend who suddenly broke away from her family during a trip overseas, persons or person-like beings in 'TV People' and in 'The Dancing Dwarf', these are all not people out of one's normal imagination with unbelievable stories. The core of the matter is, the author seems to tell the surrealist stories in realism or semi-realism. Like most postmodernist writers, Haruki Murakami presents us a world with reality and hallucination both masked by each other. It is a skilled denial of one-sided, absolute truth, no doubt. Not to mention his insistence of antagonism of brain-lazy, "self-satisfied", and phony people, and other relatively small-scaled sub-themes, Haruki Murakami proves, mainly with his charming stories and sentimental lyricisms, to be a outstanding writer who lingers in the main themes of postmodernism in a postmodern era, which persists to this day. Readers of this are welcome to discuss Haruki Murakami's works via e-mail with me. More than welcome are counter-arguments, to note.
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