But, as far as I can tell, the things that differentiate this Haruki Murakami Manga Stories from the Haruki Murakami Manga Stories I read a few months ago are the colors on the cover (pinks before, greens now), the illustration (frog before, monkeys now), and the list of stories adapted. Well, the insides are different, of course.
This one adapts three stories, as the first volume adapted four. I see there's already a third volume, adapting two stories, which implies the fourth volume will adapt one long story and the fifth volume will have none. Such are the limits of three datapoints.
See my post on the first book for questions of manga-ness, as much as I know about the adaptors (not much), and some related thoughts. This book is the same project by the same creators, very much the continuation of the same sort of thing.
First up here is "The Second Bakery Attack," a 1985 Murakami story translated in 1992, first appearing in English in Playboy and then in his collection The Elephant Vanishes the next year. A youngish married couple wakes, ravenously hungry, in the middle of the night, and the husband explains it's due to a curse - he and a friend went to rob a bakery about a decade before, as young students, stealing enough bread to eat for two days but taking no money - and were stymied by the baker, who instead made them listen to Wagner for their bread. This made things in the husband's life subtly wrong - the curse - and now it extends to his new wife as well. The answer is clear to her: they must attack another bakery, that night, and do it right: stealing only food. They don't find any traditional bakeries open in the middle of the night, but there is a McDonald's - which they then proceed to attack.
"Samsa in Love" is a reversal of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, a 2013 story that appeared in English translation in The New Yorker the same year and in the Murakami themed collection Men Without Women a few years later. In it, a creature - we're never told what, or who, he was before the story began - wakes up as Gregor Samsa, in an otherwise uninhabited house, in a Prague with some kind of tumult going on outside. He knows nothing, and needs to learn to stand and walk and speak and dress himself and everything else. He meets a hunchbacked woman, who has come to fix a lock in the house, and decides in the end that being human is worth it.
Last here is "Thailand," a story from the (1999 in Japan, 2002 in English) after the quake collection, all the stories of which were somehow about the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Satsuki is a middle-aged Japanese woman, just starting menopause and starting to feel old. She's a doctor, specializing in thyroid research, and lived in the US for a long time with her now-ex-husband. She attends a conference in Bangkok, and spends most of the next week on a vacation at a Thai resort, where she is driven by a man named Nimit. He, and a fortune-teller he takes her to, tell her that her failure to forgive that ex-husband, and to move on, has created a rock within her that will be the only thing left after she is cremated unless she takes actions now to break it up. There is a specific prophetic dream she must wait for, which will destroy the stone.
Murkami's stories are quirky, elusive things, and Deveney again adapts those qualities well into comics - these feel like the same kind of stories, even with only minimal Murakamian prose for the captions and dialogue. As usual with Murakami, the plots don't seem to make much logical sense when detailed - they operate on emotional connections and various kinds of dream-logic. And the art - by something credited as PMGL, which could be a studio or a person or an alien living secretly among us - is subtly grotesque in just the right ways for the materials, with faces that are easy to look at but never pretty and lush, detailed backgrounds.
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