Haruki Murakami Manga Stories by Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL

Some titles are more obvious than others. This book could have been called anything, but it would have been Haruki Murakami Manga Stories even if it was named something different. So some editor or functionary at Tuttle decided to be obvious, I suppose.

This book is the first in a series adapting the short stories of Haruki Murakami into manga format, exactly as the title implies. A second volume is already out; I'm not sure how many more are planned. This one has four stories, and his ISFDB entry lists thirty-two short stories in total, so there could be as many as eight volumes - more, I suppose, if he continues to write more stories, or the books do longer adaptations.

But I do want to quibble slightly at "manga." It's a project of Tuttle, an American publisher headquartered in rustic Rutland, Vermont. These stories are scripted by Jean-Christophe Deveney, who is French, and drawn by an entity calling itself PMGL, about which I can find very little online. (The back-cover bio implies it is a male human being, but offers no hints to location or the names of other works.) Manga Stories is created in full-color, and reads (at least in this digital edition) from left to right, both on individual pages and between pages. All of that is clearly comics, but I would not say it's manga. I might even argue for bande desinée.

But maybe we're in a world where all of the words for comics are mixing together, and making distinctions among them is no longer useful. That might be annoying, since I like words that mean distinctive, specific things, but it's common and not unexpected.

Anyway, there are four stories here. They are each quite separate, and all solidly Murakamian in their style, tone and concerns: literary stories told quirkily, that start from odd places and don't necessarily resolve in traditional ways.

"Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," originally appeared in after the quake, a book of six thematically-linked stories from 2003, all sparked by the 1995 Kobe earthquake. A middle-aged salaryman is surprised by, yes, a gigantic talking frog, who insists that the two of them must battle an even more gigantic supernatural Worm beneath Tokyo, which will spark a cataclysmic earthquake if not defeated. The story sets up a weird but recognizable hero's journey, and then entirely avoids telling that story.

"Where I'm Likely to Find It," was a 2005 story, published in English translation in The New Yorker almost immediately, and then collected in the English-language collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman the next year. This is a quirky-detective story: the specific quirky detective here chases missing persons, refuses to take any payment, and is looking for something larger, more central, more amorphous. (This is a Murakami story, so it's not exactly a spoiler to say he doesn't find it; Murakami stories are largely about not finding things.) The detective is hired by a woman to find her husband, who disappeared mysteriously between floors of a Tokyo high-rise, returning from calming his mother (who lives a few flights down) to an expected pancake breakfast. The detective spends days roaming the stairs of that high-rise, talking to various odd characters and contemplating the infinite, until, as so often in Murakami, the story resolves itself in a different way off the page.

Birthday Girl seems to have been only published in translation, as a small paperback first in German in 2017 and then in the UK in 2019. A woman tells the story of her twentieth birthday, ten or twenty years later, to a man who is probably the Murakami stand-in for this story. But it's all her story: she worked at a fancy restaurant, on the ground floor of a big building. And, one day, the manager was sick, and unable to take the usual dinner to the restaurant owner, a recluse who lived high up in that building. So this woman took the meal, met the owner, and was granted a wish...and doesn't tell us what the wish was.

And last is "The Seventh Man," a 1996 story (English translation 1998, in Granta), also most prominently from Blind Willow. At some kind of dinner party of middle-aged men, one man tells a story from his childhood, when he was about ten and friendly with a younger boy. That day a massive typhoon came, the two boys went out to explore while the extremely slow-moving eye sat over their coastal town, and then were caught when the storm moved. This man spent much of the rest of his life recovering from what he saw then.

Deveney effectively turns Murakami's prose into comics: these stories have the same feel and frisson as the originals. PMGL, whatever that is when it's at home, draws in a slightly grotesque style, full of details and lines and changes in color (except for "Find It," which is all grey-tones) - I thought that was also very appropriate for Murakami, and worked well. Adaptation is a tricky thing; adapting very distinctive creators even more so. Manga Stories is more purely and centrally Murakamian than I expected - it's a big success at what it set out to do.