Book-A-Day 2018 #63: Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

There are seven stories here. One is titled "Men Without Women," but it's not just the title story. Murakami is writing about men who have lost women, or are just separated from them. Men who are alone, each in their own way.

All Men Without Women. (Get it?)

This is Murakami in New Yorker story mode, rather than quirky-fantasy mode -- in fact, three of the translations here originally appeared in The New Yorker. There are no mysterious cats, no visits to or from alternate dimensions, no magical girls, no ominous dark holes in the ground.

There is more than a little jazz music, played on old-fashioned LPs, to show us that this is still Murakami, after all. But fans of early Murakami should know that this is the modern Murakami of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki rather than the Wild Sheep Chase Murakami.

I also have the vague sense that these seven stories almost have the same main character -- several of them have narrators who seem to be just not-Murakami, but several have specific details to make them more distinct. (And it's possibly someone could assemble those details into a single consistent character, though "Samsa" would be tricky to shoehorn in.) I suspect this is just Murakami doing several stories in a common style or idiom rather than something purposeful: these aren't linked stories in a normal sense, just seven stories about lonely men and the women they don't have.

Murakami, as translated from the Japanese here by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, has exquisite, precise prose and a laser-sharp eye on the emotional foibles of a certain kind of very human man. And he's never been known as a writer of plot, so no one will be surprised to find out there isn't a whole lot of plot in any of these stories.

I found this book slightly disappointing: I miss the wild early Murakami. But are any of us as wild as we were thirty years ago? It's a fine collection of literary stories, well-translated and presented in a classy package.

(Parenthetically, Murakami got the title from Hemingway, but "Men Without Women" will always remind me of the greatest American rock 'n' roll record that hardly anyone knows, from Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. So here's the title song.)

What I Read In January and Put Off Writing About For No Adequate Reason

I've spent much of this year complaining (both quietly to myself and out loud here) that I've been reading books and not writing about them. Sadly, the mere act of complaining about something does nothing at all to change the situation -- though I suspect a lot of political commentators of all stripes secretly disagree -- so the pile of books I want to say something about has kept growing.

And then, when I did write about books, I started from the top of that teetering pile, with the most recent titles, which only, at best, slowed the growth. Finally, it became clear that I needed to do something more drastic. And so this is that more drastic action: this post will cover the books I read in January and didn't write about then, with further installments to follow somewhat soon (I'm going to hope for at least weekly) until the bottom of the pile has come back within sight of the top.

You may well suspect that I won't remember these three books enough to write anything useful about them. You may be right, but here I go anyway:

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

It's true that Murakami's books circle around a small number of common tropes -- classical and jazz music, holes in the ground, cats, faceless and nameless enemies, a deep sense of urban ennui (see Grant Snider's Haruki Murakami Bingo for a better list) -- but he shares that with plenty of other writers. (I could name J.G. Ballard, for one.) There's nothing wrong with having a style, and Murakami certainly has that: his writing keeps its essential Murakami flavor even through translation, first, in his earlier novels, by Alfred Birnbaum, and more recently by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. In fact, the three books of 1Q84 were split by Rubin and Gabriel, though the result is seamless.

1Q84 is Murakami's longest novel to date, but it's not his deepest -- I'd still call Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World his most enigmatic, least fathomable novel and his best, most characteristic books are Kafka on the Shore, A Wild Sheep Chase, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 1Q84, instead, gives Murakami length -- the opportunity to stretch one of his typical plots out further than usual, to space out his sparse external events and vastly increase the number and importance of his dialogues and monologues about life.

So 1Q84 is a 900-plus page novel with a slim love story at its core -- boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl (not necessarily in that order, or in the same world) -- and a sideslip alternate-world premise. It's a novel entirely for people who already like Haruki Murakami novels -- actually, I may go back on what I just said, and declare this to be the ultimate Murakami novel for that reason. If you haven't read any other Murakami novel, don't start here. In fact, if there's any other Murakami novel you haven't read, read that one first. But this one's worth getting to, once you do.

Paul Hornschemeier, Life with Mr. Dangerous

Hornschemeier has one of the hardest-to-spell names in modern comics -- or older comics, or even general literature, come to think of it. Luckily, he's good enough at what he does to make the effort of spelling his name correctly worth it. (I read his book Mother, Come Home a few years back and have been looking for more of his stuff since.)

And I have to admit that I don't recall the details of Life With Mr. Dangerous in great detail. I think this is a more directly fictional, distaff version of Jason Shiga's Empire State -- the story of a young, emotionally closed-off person who is shocked into contemplating a new life when the closest thing to a significant other he/she has takes off for greener pastures on the other side of the country. 

(Flipping through the book, that's reductionist and not more than slightly accurate, but I'll leave it there: this is another one of those figuring-out-your-life stories about twenty-somethings, told with insight and a keen eye, and that's close enough to give you the idea without giving away anything important.)

Hornschemeier is one of the quietly excellent writer-artists in comics today; his books are touching and real and grounded, while still having that flavor of the fantastic that only comics can provide. He's often left off "best of the year" lists, and I don't know why: he's as good as anybody, and much better than most.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Literary novels -- based on subtleties of character and nuances of language -- are the last things one should leave six months to review. And yet here I am, one hundred and fifty-seven days later, trying to figure out what to say about Julian Barnes's Booker Prize-winning short novel The Sense of an Ending.

This is the story of a man almost old: retired, settled, quietly leading a life where nothing is expected to change until that one last irrevocable change. But then the dead past -- literally dead, as in a friend from forty years past who committed suicide then -- come back, and he has to work through what really happened then, and what it means to him now.

Like several of Barnes's previous novels, Sense of an Ending has a love triangle at its core: Tony went out with Veronica briefly back in the '60s, and then she shifted her attentions to his more brilliant friend Adrian, who soon killed himself. The book takes place almost entirely in Tony's head, first during the '60s (seen in retrospect) and then in the modern day, colored by those '60s days of youth and energy. Barnes, as a writer, has often I think been painted as not quite as brilliant as one or another of his cohort -- not as cutting as Ian McEwan, not as slashing as Martin Amis -- but it's always dangerous to read a protagonist as too close to his author. Still, it must be pleasing to prove them (whoever "them" are) wrong at his age, with a precise, measured stiletto like this.

I imagine most of the people who read my blog aren't interested in novels like this, but Sense of an Ending is short, thoroughly excellent, and a tricky, sneaky, twisty story about real people and their lives over the last forty years. If you only hit a literary novel once a decade or so, you could do far worse than to make this one your choice this time out.

Wind/Pinball: Two Novels by Haruki Murakami

For a long time, I thought I'd never get a chance to read Murakami's first two novels. Sure, they were translated into English back in the '80s, and copies of those editions -- designed for teaching, as I understand it, and barely distributed to the larger book-buying world -- were available now and then for more money than I wanted to think about. But it looked like Murakami didn't want them available in English, and their price and obscurity made them essentially unavailable here.

Murakami changed his mind, perhaps -- or maybe that impression was false. Last year, his regular US publisher, Knopf, brought out those two short novels in one book as Wind/Pinball, in new translations by Ted Goossen. (The two books are Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 -- they're directly connected, being about the same characters at the same time of life.) So we Americans got to see how he started, all the way back in the late '70s. This edition of the two novels together is still quite short, since the books are each novella-length, barely a hundred pages each. (If I knew more about the history of Japanese publishing, I would pontificate here on their place in literary history and try to connect them to the modern "light novel." But I have no idea about any of those things.)

These two stories are very much those of a young man, of a young ambitious writer who desperately wants to say things and who really only has his own young life as material to work from. That's a very clear type of novel; a few of them get published every year and dozens more end up in drawers. Murakami had something a little more interesting, I suppose -- he won a literary award for Wind, so this is more than just hindsight speaking -- whether that was his unexpectedly simple style, his casual use of surrealism, or something else. (On the first point, Murakami provides a new introduction to this edition in which he talks about his life at the time and how he came to write these books -- and he notes that he wrote at least the beginning of Wind in English originally, and only then translated it into Japanese. He specifically says that helped him crystallize his style, working in a language he knew only partially, and not being able to construct complex sentences or explain complicated ideas.)

They're not plotty books; that's what I'm saying. Less so, even, than Murakami's later novels. These are two stories of voice and character and of their time -- that time being the late '60s and early '70s, and the characters students and graduates and young people. You could call them countercultural books; they would have been more so if Murakami wrote them at the time rather than nearly a decade later. They do apparently lead right into Murakami's thrid novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, but I haven't read that in at least twenty years, so I can't give you more details than that. (I may need to go back to it.)

Wind and Pinball are clearly Murakami novels; you can see the later writer in embryo in these stories. But they're equally clearly early works by that writer, in an idiom much more "mainstream" and convention than he later became. If there's anyone out there who needs an on-ramp to Murakami, you are finally in luck. Otherwise, they're interesting minor early works from a writer who got better -- which is what we all always hope for, for ourselves and the writers we like and the world at large.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami

Is it reductive to say we're in the Era of Minor Murakami? I mean, I don't think 1Q84 is anyone's favorite novel of his, though I can't speak to Killing Commendatore (it's still lurking on my shelf, daring me to find two or three months to read it). And, for the second time this decade, he's put out a small book of short stories, which he apparently wrote as a batch to become a book.

First Person Singular has a lot in common with 2014's Men Without Women, not least that all of the narrators seem to be the same person, and that person is an only just barely fictionalized version of Murakami himself. (He even uses his own name in one of the stories here, as if he gave up on the dance halfway through.) But these stories are even more unified than the ones in Men were: they are all clearly stories told by the same person, in the same voice - all stories by an older man, a man looking backwards, to one thing and then another.

The title claims less than the stories themselves do: it just says they're all narrated in the first person. And maybe Murakami and his editors believe these eight stories are by or about different men. It's not impossible. But they read like the same person; they read like moments in the same life.

I suppose that's a bonus for the book, then? It's not just a batch of unconnected short fiction, but eight things that belong together?

All of the stories are short; all of the stories are literary. All more allusive and thoughtful than plot-driven. All about memories and things in the past, things brought back to mind. I'm not going to catalog them. Most of them are about women, though not as comprehensively or directly as the previous collection. (One is about a monkey, but it's still about women.) There are surreal or fantastika elements, but the strongest, most major one is an uneasy element on the very last page of the book, in the title story - it feels almost like something that was going to be a novel, but didn't, so Murakami pruned it back to a short story and left it (and the book as a whole) to end in that thorny, uneasy, eruptive moment.

Murakami is a fine writer, as always. Or maybe I mean translator Philip Gabriel makes him into a fine writer in English - but Gabriel is the third major translator in Murakami's career, and all three have presented the same voice in English. At this point, I have to believe they're doing the core job of a translator: taking what is specific about the original language and finding ways to replicate that in the new language. That this, more or less, is what Murakami sounds like in Japanese.

I still think it's minor Murakami. But minor work by a major writer is...I'm not sure of that calculus. Still worth reading, I suppose. Yes. I'll go with that. 

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami has spent a lot of the last decade or so writing things that aren't fantasy. Well, let me back up: he never wrote genre fantasy, and I'm sure plenty of readers would violently disagree that his odd, drifting surrealist narratives are what they would call "fantasy" to begin with. But his most characteristic books feature strange dislocations, alternate worlds, inexplicable disappearances, places that correspond to mental states, and other clear elements of fantastika. If we describe a writer or work as "Murakamian," that's what we're talking about: a set of tropes that reflect a non-realistic world.

I still haven't read his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, so I can't speak to that. But, in the past decade, he's had a couple of collections of mostly-literary short stories, Men Without Women and First Person Singular. He's done some odd little non-fiction things, Murakami T and Novelist As a Vocation. And, possibly relevant to this book, the even-quirkier-than-usual novella The Strange Library.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is his most recent novel; he was writing it during the pandemic. It was published in Japanese in 2023 and in English, translated by Philip Gabriel, in November of 2024. It is an expansion or alternate version of an early Murakami novella of almost the same title - the novella has a comma after "City" - and somewhat related to the early Murakami novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was a different reworking of that novella.

And it's a disappointing book. Inherently so, since it sets off telling one story, and abandons that entirely. I don't want to completely spoil the ending, but the ending does not answer any of the major questions raised by the opening or resolve the major relationship detailed there. Some books circle, some spiral - this one wanders, sometimes seeming aimless as it goes over here for a while, then back over there again, then off to another place.

It also made me very salty about a fantasy trope I've seen several times before, turning me super-literal as I read. You see, there are people in this book who do not have shadows. All very quirky and mysterious, yes. But how does that work? Does light just not illuminate the fronts of these people? Are their faces always dark, because the light wraps around them to shine just as brightly behind them?

It annoyed me because a shadow is not, despite fantasy thinking, a thing. A shadow is an absence, a place where a light doesn't shine because something is in its way. For a shadow not to be there, the thing that casts the shadow has to also not be there, or otherwise be made transparent to light.

Yes, I know it's a metaphor - a tedious, dull, obvious one, which we've all seen a thousand times - but it's a stupid metaphor that doesn't match anything about how the world actually works, and it physically pains me to see it running out at length in fine prose by a writer I otherwise respect.

Anyway, The City opens archly, with an unnamed boy and an unnamed girl in an unnamed region of Japan in an unnamed time some time in the past few decades. They meet as winners of a a school contest, date for about a year without getting physical, and then the girl stops responding to the boy's letters.

Spoiler alert: the actual, live girl never shows up again in the novel. Not once. Not at all. We never learn what she did, where she lived, what happened to her. The boy is obsessed with her for the rest of his life, but that's entirely about him, in that very Murakamian male-narrator way.

The girl explains a fantasy idea she has, and that she believes. She is not a real person; she is the shadow of someone else. The real her lives in an unnamed town surrounded by an ancient, unbreakable wall, somewhere not directly reachable from the normal physical world. Everyone in that town lacks shadows.

The boy comes to believe in this town, too. The title calls it a "city," but the book always refers to it as a "town." I don't know if that is meant to be significant. It also seems like a small town, one contracting and dying slowly over time, partially since it, by definition, has no connection to any other place. I also don't think Murakami meant the fact that this town is slowly dying to be meaningful; I'm not sure he realized he described it as dying, frankly.

Most of the people in the town do things the narrator doesn't care about, presumably agriculture or something, though people in this town also don't eat very much. But the girl - or the real version of the girl - works as the librarian there. And the boy somehow, many years later, finds himself at the gates of this town. He has his shadow cut away by the Gatekeeper, and moves into the town to work as the Dream Reader in that library.

To explain a bit more: the girl in the town is the same age as she was when the boy met her, as if she never changed. It's possibly no one in the town changes, but Murakami doesn't make that clear - and he does make it clear that the town has been shrinking in scope and population for a long time. So maybe people stay the same age, but sometimes suddenly die or disappear? The girl doesn't know the boy; she's the other version - even less does she know the middle-aged man he grew into. But her job is to keep the library, a big building filled with egg-like objects. And his job is to fondle those objects, which are Dreams, and then describe the dreams they embody, so they work together for an unspecified time.

But his severed shadow, which is living in what sounds like a paddock just outside the town, is dying, in a very slow, vague Ali MacGraw-kind of way. And it pushes the narrator to reconnect the two of them - which is supposedly impossible, a breach of the agreement he made when he came to the town - so they can return to the real world.

The narrator eventually agrees, and the two go to a deep dark and very symbolic pool in a disused corner of the town, where the narrator then suddenly balks at leaving. But the rules change yet again, and the shadow can now leave on its own and the narrator will stay behind.

But instead the narrator - or a version of him; it's not clear how he or we could be sure he's the only one - finds himself back in his old life in the real world, with a shadow that doesn't talk back or have an independent existence.

By the way, at this point we're only about halfway through the novel; there's a lot of semi-aimless Murakamian conversations full of people repeating phrases back to each other and vaguely philosophical Thoughts About Stuff both before and after here.

The narrator decides to find a job in a random library somewhere in the countryside, because he liked the Dream Reader gig. Because this is a Murakami novel, that random change of career for no particular reason does actually work, and he finds himself the new head librarian of the town of Z*, somewhere very rural and mountainous. The previous head librarian, who he does not realize for quite some time is already dead, gives him advice and guidance.

We get a lot of day-to-day life in Z* and day-to-day running of a small library and day-to-day chatting with a dead guy, and some day-to-day maybe-sorta flirtation of the narrator with a café owner who could become a love interest, for quite a long time, while what we thought was our plot disappears over the horizon. Eventually, a teen everyone calls Yellow Submarine Boy, after a "parka" he always wears - it sounds more like a sweatshirt or hoodie, since it's worn under a coat and needs to be washed semi-regularly, but anyway - rises up in the narrative, with a sheaf of vaguely autist behaviors, and, after even longer, learns about the walled town from our narrator.

Yellow Submarine Boy declares that he and the narrator are the same person, and that they need to merge and go back to the walled town so they can be the Dream Reader. Because this is a Murakami novel, this is actually true, and happens.

In the short last section, Yellow Submarine Boy and the narrator do live in the town again, do perform brilliantly at dream reading, which still seems as pointless and unconnected to anything else as it ever did, and then, very quickly, separate once again at the very end of the book.

At the very end, either Yellow Submarine Boy kicks the narrator out of his own life and purpose and the narrator dies, or the narrator goes back to the real world yet again for another period of tedious living that Murakami will not describe for us, or maybe something transcendent happens that Murakami will also not describe. Then we get an afterword, with Murakami explaining the various lives of this story, and how he wrote this one. Since he is a Big Name Bestselling Author, he doesn't mention anyone pointing out that this novel doesn't actually resolve the situation it sets up at the beginning, or answer any questions about the girl, which the narrator spends the entire book thinking about and obsessing on.

The City, like a lot of Murakami's work, runs largely on vibes. If those vibes connect with you, you will enjoy it. If, like me, they seem arbitrary and capricious where they actually make sense in the first place, you will be annoyed by the plot and ending even if you enjoy the language and writing. Keep that in mind if you consider reading it.

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.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

I don't know if this is true, but I'll say it anyway: it feels true.

In every group of close-knit friends, there's always one -- at least one -- not as tightly connected as the others. That's the friend who would be thrown out of the sleigh first when the wolves get closer, the comic relief who the slasher picks off before the opening credits, the one who was always there and dependable but somehow no more than that.

Tsukuru Tazaki was that guy. Growing up in the provincial Japanese city of Nagoya, he was part of a group of five -- two girls, three boys -- who were always together for years. Four of them stayed local after high school, and only he moved away -- to go to school in Tokyo to study train-station architecture. (Yes, something that specific. It's good to have a passion, yes?)

And, in the middle of his sophomore year, on a trip home between semesters, those friends told Tsukuru that they never wanted to see him again. It nearly killed him -- literally; he almost stopped eating and didn't leave his apartment for months -- and he didn't see any of them for more than a decade afterward. But then his life went on; he completed his studies and went to work in his chosen field, designing and building train stations. And, in his mid-thirties, a new girlfriend trying to get to know him better learned this story, and insisted that he needed to find out why he was shunned.

That's where Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the most recent novel from Haruki Murakami translated into English, begins. Tsukuru has realized that there's something broken, or unfinished, inside of him, and he needs to understand his past to move forward -- and, he hopes, to make a stronger and lasting relationship with this new woman, Sara.

Colorless is the closest to a mainstream novel Murakami has come since his first couple of books: there are no oracular cats here, no slips into alternate worlds, no mysterious holes in the ground, no doubles or dopplegangers. There are unsettling and odd dreams, of course -- all literary writers love dreams, even if they hate fantasy in every other form -- but those barely count in the world of Murakami. Instead, this book is the story of a man who was broken without entirely realizing it, about how he tried to find the edges of that break, and how he got to the moment where he might be ready to heal that break.

(It's still a literary novel; it ends before any possible catharsis or true indication of Tsukuru's state.)

The prose is solid Murakami, but the blander plot disappointed me: I was hoping for an eruption of the numinous, or some other unreal explanation for the shunning. Tsukuru does learn why he was cast out, and it's an adequate reason, even if he and we will never know all the details -- but it's not a traditionally Murakamiesque reason.

If I were being flippant, I'd make some kind of comment on that word Colorless; this novel has less of the wild colors and imaginative strokes of Murakami's best books. (And maybe I just did that while claiming I'm not going to.) I don't know if this novel will be disappointing to every reader: Murakami has a stronger sense of plot here, and is better at moving from present-time into flashback and back out than he did in his earlier, wilder novels. I suspect SFnal readers will tend to be disappointed, and the folks who wish Murakami would buckle down and lose the weird cats and magic girls will be happier. Let me know where you fall on that divide, if you've read this book, and if that's right.

Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love by Haruki Murakami

It must be nice to be a world-famous and -popular writer. You can get nice little additional revenue streams from normal life stuff such as "owning a lot of T-shirts" and "talking to a guy from a magazine."

I kid, slightly: most of Murakami T is a series of essays that Haruki Murakami wrote for the Japanese magazine Popeye between 2018 and 2020, so it is actually work he did. But the impetus for the project was "Hey, you have a lot of T-shirts. Want to write a short essay about a group of them each month?"

Murakami provides an introduction, to explain the whole odd project - apparently his record collection is even more impressive and famous, so he was first interviewed about that for the magazine BRUTUS, and happened to mention there that he'd also accumulated a lot of shirts, so some editor took his shot and got a series of new Murakami work for his magazine. (Shine on, random editor from the company that owns Popeye and BRUTUS; that was a great idea and I hope it got you at least some in-office egoboo.)

The bulk of the book is the eighteen essays from Popeye, presented here in what I think is their original order, along with photographs of the relevant shirts by Yasumoto Ebisu. Last is a pair of interviews, from the beginning and end of the project, conducted by Kunichi Nomura, whom I assume was associated with Popeye in some capacity.

This is light Murkami, but it's still Murakami - along the lines of his introductions and other occasional nonfiction - so the prose has his characteristic tone and concerns and manner, sliding from one idea to something unrelated and keeping that direct, conversational tone. It is obviously a minor, vanity project, but still of interest to Murakami fans, and, maybe, others.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Murakami has been a devotee of Raymond Carver and an equally devoted long-distance runner since he began his career as a novelist, which explains both the title of this slim non-fiction book and its subject matter.

It was written, as a series of nine loosely-connected essays, mostly in the summer of 2005, with more roadwork done in 2006 and words both fore and after from August of 2007.

Murakami started running seriously after his first two novels were published and he decided to quit his previous job -- running a jazz club he owned in Tokyo -- to devote himself full-time to writing. The first essay explains that, along with Murakami's general history both as a novelist and a runner.

He's run a marathon nearly every year since 1983, and has run an ultramarathon once and triathlons several times -- he's clearly very devoted to running, and has made it a central part of his life. Still, he describes it as something he does to keep himself healthy to write novels, and mentions pulling back on his training regiment several times when it was threatening to take too much time from his real work. He's not obsessed, just devoted.

And so What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a series of meditations on novel-writing and long-distance running, particularly on their similarities. Along the way, Murakami gives the reader some bits of memoir, but really only those bits that relate to his running life. It's a book, as other reviewers have said, of interest only to fans of Murakami's fiction and to dedicated runners -- and, particularly, to that small subset of people who are both. Those few are likely to clash this book to heart and never let it go; the rest of us find it pleasant but not nearly as compelling as Murakami's other books.

Book-A-Day #59 (9/14): Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

There was a good review of this book in this weekend's New York Times Book Review, which I mostly agreed with, so I won't repeat what Terrence Rafferty said there.

I would be a bit more specific, though, by linking some separate items in Murakami's introduction: his first English-language story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, came out in 1992, and featured the best of his short stories to date. He also has only written a couple of stories in the decade since then (except for the separate linked collection after the quake, and, more importantly, the last five stories in this book, which were published as Strange Tales from Tokyo in Japan last year). So it's fairly clear that most of the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are the ones that were considered for The Elephant Vanishes, but weren't thought to be as good as those stories by Murakami, his translators, and/or his Knopf editors.

This explains why most of this book was subtly disappointing to me; it's hard to nail things down, story-by-story, without a detailed permissions list on the copyright page (which every short story collection should have, in my opinion), but I have the impression that most of these stories are actually earlier than the Elephant Vanishes stories. There's less of Murakami's more mature style, with fantastic elements thrown in casually and buried connections that the reader has to tease out, and a lot of Raymond Carver-y more-or-less mainstream stories.

Some of the earlier stories, though, are as good as any of Murakami's work -- notably the title story and "Firefly." (And some others almost work as well as they should, such as "A 'Poor Aunt' Story" and "The Seventh Man.")

More importantly, though, the five Strange Stories are great -- Murakami at top form. If Knopf had published them as a small book of their own (as they were in Japan, and much like after the quake here), it would have been one of the highlights of his career -- as good as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles or Kafka on the Shore. They may be embedded in a longer, more mixed book, but they're still essential Murakami.

Novelist As a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Books by writers about how they work almost always turn into advice. I understand that: the audience for work about how novels get written is mostly people who desperately want to write novels themselves.

I'm not one of them, though - I sort-of was, thirty-some years ago, but working in the bookmines has a tendency to clear that condition right up. As my boss used to say, why spend a year writing a novel when buying one only costs a few bucks?

Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of linked essays - the first few appeared as a series in the Japanese magazine Monkey Business; then he finished up the set so this book could be published in Japan in 2015; the English-language edition, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, took another seven years to emerge - all about his life and work as a novelist, pitched explicitly to an audience of people who also want to write novels.

Murakami is refreshingly down-to-earth about his work: he sees writing as a long hard process, made up of many days all mostly the same, but he enjoys doing it and enjoys the end product. (Many writers hate one or the other or both.) He also focuses on the physical aspect of writing more than most writers-about-writing do; he's a marathoner, and clearly sees the processes of training for and running a marathon and of writing a long novel as roughly parallel. (See What I Talk About When I Talk About Running for the other side of the same coin, about a decade before.) So there's a lot about being healthy and strong - he doesn't say "mens sana in corpore sano" but he's very much in that tradition.

Murakami is Japanese, of course, so his references are the literary and publishing culture of that nation, which are (as far as I can tell) pretty different from what I'm used to in the US. The clubbiness and fitting-into-little-boxes aspects of Japanese culture and business are clearly dominant in that publishing milieu, and several of the essays see Murakami comment on or complain (mildly; he's had a good successful career and doesn't seem to be the type to rant anyway) on aspects of that world, particularly the literary prizes that affected his early career.

But, generally, this is the book to answer the questions "How does Haruki Murakami write his novels?" and "How does he think about his work, and what's in his mind about writing?" It is somewhat more pitched as advice-to-newcomers than I personally would prefer, but that's the subgenre and I should have expected it. It's all in quite Murakamian prose, in his non-fiction mode, pleasant and conversational and slightly quirky.

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

For some readers, a book with a connection to the world of books is immediately appealing. Have a major setting in a library or bookstore, throw in an author as a major character, make the maguffin some old book with secrets that must be retrieved, and those folks are in line immediately to plunk down their nickels.

Full disclosure, here: I'm talking about myself. I may be talking about you as well, but you'll have to decide that one yourself.

So a slim book from Haruki Murakami called The Strange Library was obviously going to be catnip to me and people like me. First, the whole library thing. Second, it's short: a quick read. (Shorter even than I expected: I didn't count words, but it took substantially less than an hour to read. It might well not even reach novella length.) And add in that this library is "strange," too -- well, how could I pass it up?

The Strange Library is deeply Murakami-esque, with a passive young narrator -- a schoolboy visiting his local library one day -- when he gets sent into a surreal landscape, and trapped in a place where the normal rules don't apply. Our young man is just looking for some books, and follows the directions he's given -- go to this room in the basement, and then follow the requisite nasty librarian to the "inner room" to read the chosen books, where things go wrong. It's so short that saying much more than that about the plot probably would give away everything, but the back cover mentions "a mysterious girl" and "a tormented sheep man," so it's fair to note that this boy is not entirely alone.

The Strange Library is concentrated Murakami, which means it comes very close to being complete nonsense and is redeemed primarily by his matter-of-fact tone (as rendered in English by translator Ted Goossen). Any attempt to justify the plot or setup will fail immediately; this is a book about atmosphere and feeling and fine sentences rather than about things that actually happen or could happen. Frankly, it's not terribly satisfying for those reasons: Murakami works best when he has more space to spin his quirkly alternate worlds, and his readers have time to settle into those worlds and live within their unspoken rules for a while. Strange Library, on the other hand, is more of a sketch, over almost before it starts. It's best left to those who are already Murakami fans.

Reading into the Past: Week of February 1, 1994

I think the new regime is that I'm going to try to do a "Reading Into the Past" post on Mondays where I don't have any new books to list as "Reviewing the Mail". We'll see if that works, but RitP is somewhat similar to RtM, in that they're both random lists of books that I know or remember only scattered things about.

Under the current scheme, I use a RNG to pick a year between 1990 (when I started keeping a reading notebook) and 2010 (roughly when I started listing every last thing I read here), and then write about the books I was reading "this" week in that year.

And, this time out, I have...1994.

Karen Kijewski, Katwalk (1/25)

The first in a mystery series, about private eye Kat Colorado of Sacramento. (I think there's still room for a series about the PI Cat Kalifornia of Boulder.) I was reading a lot of mysteries in those days, particularly PI books, and I was trying to read as many female PIs as I could. That's mostly because the energy in the field was in women writers and women protagonists, in the wake of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller. I enjoyed this series, though I think it got more thriller-y as it went on -- but that happened to a lot of series in the '90s anyway. Kijewski wrote nine of these in a decade, and then apparently stopped. As I recall, they were good solid mystery novels, though they may seem seriously "of their time" thirty years later. 

Lawrence Block, The Specialists (1/25)

Carroll & Graf (I think) were reprinting a lot of random Larry Block books around this time -- mostly the non-series books, since those were cheap, but I think they also did the Chip Harrison books -- as part of a general blast of Block going on in the market. I was then (and am now) a pretty serious Block fan, and in those days I could read almost as fast as books could be published, so that made me happy. This is an odd thriller from 1968, originally published as a paperback original, that I have to believe was supposed to launch a series but never did. A wounded Colonel gathers five of his men -- all Green Berets, all decorated veterans from Vietnam -- to do semi-legal activities to help regular people and hurt organized crime and other nefarious types. Block was morally certain someone read this book and crayoned the idea for The A-Team afterward, which is possible. My memory is that this is a pretty pulpy '60s paperback thriller, but just fine on that basis.

Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance (1/27)

This was Murakami's new book, and it was published in hardcover in January. My guess is that we did not see it for the club -- and I was awfully junior at that point, without contacts to bug at Knopf to get a free copy -- so I just bought the damn thing myself and read it during the month of publication. That's slightly sad, since this is the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, which had been not only a SFBC Alternate, but was my introduction to Murakami as a member of the SFBC. Well, I knew the deal when I went into the disreputable end of publishing. I feel like I need to re-read those early Murakami books -- Wild Sheep and this and Hard-Boiled Wonderland -- since they are in my head as the purest, most undiluted Murakami. I don't know when I'll have time to do that, but the urge is there. If you've never read this, read Wild Sheep first. If you've never read Murakami, in fact, read Wild Sheep. Start right now; the rest of this blog post can wait.

Paula E. Downing,  A Whisper of Time (loose galleys, 1/27)

Well, the entirety of my memory of this is "SF in mass market from Del Rey." And that seems to be true, for what that's worth. Downing changed her writing name to first Paula Downing King and then just Paula King later that decade, but her career seems to have fizzled from this point -- this was her last Del Rey book, then came a SF trilogy under the King name from Roc (not a great sign in those days) and a decade later a fantasy trilogy as Diana Marcessas. According to descriptions online, this is the story of a young alien (totally humanoid, a la Star Trek) woman raised by humans and how she investigates the ancient ruins she was discovered in as a child. I have no memory of the story whatsoever.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II, No Happy Ending (1/28)

Another mystery novel -- Taibo is a Mexican novelist, and this is a translated PI story about his series character Hector Belascoaran Shayne. This may have been the only Taibo novel I read, or maybe I read one or two others -- I definitely did not dig in, but I don't know how much of Taibo has been translated, at the time or since. My memory is that it was interesting and distinct, deeply Chandleresque with deeply crooked police and a corrupt society that Taibo's hero fought against in the ways he could.

Lisa Goldstein, Summer King, Winter Fool (typescript, 1/29)

I don't remember this book -- about a god who falls in love with the human world, causing various problems -- clearly, but I've always been impressed with Goldstein, who doers something different every book and always writes clearly and very well. Seeing her name here makes me want to re-read this, or read other Goldstein books.

James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (bound galleys, 1/30)

One of the great SFF novels of the '90s, full stop. One of the most audacious novels, in any genre, ever written. It also won the World Fantasy Award, and deserved it. God is dead, and his immense corpse is blocking the shipping lane of the North Atlantic -- so it needs to be moved out of the way. Quite possibly the quintessential sour Morrow novel, as Only Begotten Daughter was the unexpected quintessential sweet Morrow novel. (Note: it's not all that sweet.) Read it if you haven't.

Jim Thompson, Cropper's Cabin (1/31)

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard was in the middle of a massive Thompson reprint project, and I was on board for all of it. Before my 2011 flood, I had (I think) every Thompson novel they published, all in those matching trade-paper editions. Since there were around thirty of them, I may now have some slight trouble remembering exactly which one this was. I believe this was a fairly early book, about a young man from a hardscrabble Oklahoma town (like Thompson was himself) battling his own father and his girlfriend's father and his own anger. If I remember anything about Thompson, it doesn't end happily.

And, just for completeness's sake, the next book I finished was Macintosh User's Guide to Macintosh Performa Computers on 2/3, because I either just had bought one or was just about to buy one. And I've always been a do-a-lot-of-research kind of person. So, yes, I did read computer books cover-to-cover, and then wrote them down in my reading notebook. (Note: from some googling, this appears to be the pack-in manual that came with the computer, which makes it even sillier that I read it cover-to-cover and wrote it down in the notebook. What can I say? I was 24 and in love with keeping track of things.)

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 2 by Jean-Christophe Deveney & PMGL

The book I have in front of me doesn't have a "2" on it anywhere I can see. There are several library stickers on the spine, though - maybe it's there.

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.

Book-A-Day 2014 #68: Stargazing Dog by Takashi Murakami

Every sequence of events has in it the seeds of every kind of story: it can be a tragedy, a comedy, or farce, depending on whose point-of-view you see it from, when you begin, and when you end. Some frames fit more comfortably than others, but you can shove a story into any frame you want -- and, if you're skilled enough, you can even make it fit.

One way of alleviating a story that would otherwise be unrelievedly bleak is through that point-of-view trick: tell the story of a woman imprisoned for years by her child, for example. Or tell the story of a middle-aged man who loses his job, then his family, and then everything else as seen by his faithful and ever-loving dog.

The latter is what Takashi Murakami's Stargazing Dog does, and that's what keeps it from being entirely bleak. It's still a tragedy -- Murakami would have had to do a lot more damage to this story to avoid that -- but it's a tragedy seen through uncomprehending eyes, with a viewpoint that's positive and happy as only a dog can be.

Happie is that dog; we see most of Stargazing Dog through his eyes. Though we do begin outside of that viewpoint, and have a long section at the end outside of it as well: those frame Happie's story, and tell us the things we need to know to understand what Happie and his "Daddy" did and experienced. So we know from the second page that this is some kind of tragedy: that a man and his dog are already dead.

But Happie begins his story from puppyhood, and his viewpoint never loses that essential sweetness and enthusiasm about life. That life is a pleasant routine for many years, with Mom (who feeds him), Daddy (who walks him) and Miku (who grows up in the space of a couple pages and ignores him). The happy years are gone in a few panels: Daddy is soon left jobless with a heart condition, and then Mom divorces him, for what seems to be the Japanese equivalent of "it's not you, it's me."

So Daddy takes Happie in his car and the two head south, heading to Daddy's childhood home, where he hopes things will be better. It doesn't work out that way, of course. They make it some distance to the south, but their things -- money and possessions and papers, options and choices and ways out -- are stripped from them one by one.

But nothing can take Happie's joy for life, and nothing will drag him away from Daddy. So when the end comes for each of them -- as it comes for all of us, after all -- we see it through Happie's eyes. And then, after the end, we get to see a hardworking social worker try to figure out who Daddy was, and to give us more context about what happened to them.

Stargazing Dog is more than just a sad story, though: it's a critique, sharply aimed in its oblique way, at specific government policies in Japan that Murakami thinks created an army of "Daddies." Maybe they all didn't hit the road with their dogs, but they each suffered in their own ways, and Murakami thinks it was unnecessary. (I don't have the background to judge, so I'll leave it at that.) Murakami has an afterword explaining some of this, though it's written in that self-effacing style so common in Japanese culture, which leaves me wondering about its nuances.

Still, Stargazing Dog has a strong story to tell, and it tells it in a strong way: Happie is a lovely literary creation and Daddy is an interesting individual, even if we don't really know the particulars of his travails and problems. Although this is translated from the Japanese, it's presented "flipped" -- reading left-to-right, like Western comics -- which will make it easier to follow for the vast majority of Americans. And, in the end, its message is positive: even an abandoned man like Daddy had a faithful dog to love him and be with him at the end.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Just Read: After Dark by Haruki Murakami

This is a very minor Murakami book. So minor, in fact, that I'm afraid that The Millions might just right about him.

OK, I won't quite go that far -- but the idea that Murakami is just writing automatically in After Dark, churning out pages and hoping a story will emerge, is uncomfortably plausible. This is a very thinly plotted novel: a young woman, who starts off sitting in a Tokyo restaurant just before midnight, runs into various people, some of whom also interact with each other, over the course of one night. (Oh, and, in a presumably parallel plot, her older sister sleeps, gets sucked through a TV into a strange featureless room, goes back to sleep, and ends up back where she came from.) It all doesn't add up to very much; the various plot threads are mostly left unresolved, and the book doesn't end so much as stop.

The dialogue also shows Murakami spinning his wheels; his people tend to talk too much -- and in an odd, stylized manner, "as you know, Bob"-ing each other and asking lots of leading questions so the other person can continue a near-monologue -- in the first place, but that's even more of an issue here, when it doesn't seem as if that dialogue is driving the plot anywhere.

All in all, After Dark is a disappointment. It reads as if Murakami was trying to write himself into a story, didn't quite succeed, but published the results anyway. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't read Murakami before, and even his fans (like me) are likely to be disappointed in it.

Haruki Murakami

This was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 4/10/01, and I'll repost it here, unaltered. It was in response to someone (name now forgotten) who'd asked what Murakami's writing was like. I think you folks can figure out why I'm resurrecting it now...

I'm quite fond of his books (there's a new one coming out at the end of the month! yay!), but my sense is that I'm liking them with the half of my brain that likes Don DeLillo and Kazuo Ishiguro rather than the half that likes George R.R. Martin and Iain M. Banks.

That probably wasn't helpful...

A Wild Sheep Chase is generally considered to be his best book (and those who don't agree mostly like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World is, as I recall, an interesting but very odd novel, something like Kafka filtered through Mishima. I read it when it was published, about ten years ago (reading Wild Sheep Chase, his first novel to be translated into English, made me a huge fan), but haven't re-read it since, so my recollection of it is fuzzy.

Murakami writes in a quite readable style, but he tends to focus on little details and thoughts in a way that may seem slow or boring to someone who is reading looking for something else. I recall reading an interview with Murakami in which he said that he deliberately followed Raymond Chandler's style. It isn't a clear line by any means (Chandler to his Japanese translator to Murakami through his English translator), but there are glimpses of a Chandleresque tone. He doesn't do the quirky metaphors that Chandler's best known for,
though.

In general, I'd say it's well worth reading, and you might possibly have found a new author to love. I hope you'll report back once you've read it.

Incoming Books: April 29

I took my first vacation day of the year yesterday, because I guess I realized I'd better start if I didn't want to lose them. (Though the new job, along with longer hours in smaller spaces and a longer commute, also features substantially less time off than the previous job. I seem to be progressing through the classical Greek ages in my own life, and have now reached the Age of Iron. [1])

But, on this rare day off, I did get over to a bookstore, and brought home some good stuff. (At least, I hope it's good stuff -- no one wants to find the book they've been looking forward to is lousy.) And here's what those books were:

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy -- a comedic young-woman-in-the-city book from the '50s; the city in this case is Paris, and I believe, as required by the form, it's semi-autobiographical. New York Review Books republished this last decade, and I've picked it up at least half a dozen times (usually at The Strand) but never managed to buy it before now. I like humorous novels, and I want to read more books by women, and I'm contrarian enough to want to read half-forgotten books whenever possible -- so this pushes a lot of my buttons.

Flashman and the Dragon and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, both by the inimitable George Macdonald Fraser -- the last two "Flashman" books I needed to get to re-complete my set. I will re-read the whole series through at some point, but "some point" could wait quite some time.

Great Plains by Ian Frazier -- he's a New Yorker writer than I've followed for a long time, and I'm slowly knocking off the last few books of his that I hadn't gotten to yet. The two major things in that category were his major nonfiction books of the '80s and '90s: this one and Family, which I hit around the turn of this year. This is, I think, a John McPhee-esque look at the big sea of grass and corn [2] in the middle of my country.

I Was a Child by Bruce Eric Kaplan -- BEK is a well-known New Yorker cartoonist and a successful Hollywood writer (mostly TV, I think) and has made a few odd dawn books (like Everything is Going to Be Okay) and books for kids (like Monsters Eat Whiny Children). This is his memoir, presumably of a childhood that was horrible in some way -- no one ever writes a memoir about their happy childhoods -- and which I didn't know existed until I stumbled across it in the store. (Even though our current world has much more information about books available to everyone all the time, I still miss when I was hyper-connected to the book world and knew about every book I might potentially be interested in at least six months before publication. Yup, Age of Iron once again.)


The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro -- you might have heard of this one; Ishiguro is a big deal, and this was a major book last year. It's now out in paper, and I do want to read it eventually -- I've liked most of Ishiguro's books, and really loved his first few novels and the dark, difficult The Unconsoled in particular. I'm still a little Ishiguro-shy after his misfired attempt at SF in Never Let Me Go. (That book had some very good things -- it was psychologically true in a way very little SF ever gets close to -- but the SFnal aspects were so bobbled that the book was horribly grating to me.)

Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami -- Murakami's first two, supposedly much more realistic novels, finally translated into English. There was a time when I'd grab each new Murakami translation and read it immediately -- hell, there was a time when I would grab anything and read it immediately -- but the Age of Iron is upon me now, and I've got at least one Murakami on the unread shelves. (Maybe two.) This is short, though, and contains two novels, so I have hopes.

Medusa's Web by Tim Powers -- Powers is one of the great writers of our time, period. He writes novels with fantasy and history intertwined in them, and is a slow enough writer that even I can keep up with him. Some of his books -- Declare, The Stress of Her Regard, Last Call -- are as good as anyone's in the world, and the rest are pretty darn good, too. I'm hoping this is one of the sublime ones; it's been a while and Powers is usually good for one of those a decade. What is it about? I don't care.


[1] If anyone wonders why this blog is so quiet lately, I offer the following math: +1.5 hours at work a day, +1 hour commuting a day, +10 days at work = a very tired hornswoggler.

[2] I might be repeating myself there: is corn grass?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 14, 2024

This is actually the third weekly post listing things I got in various ways the last week of August; I was on vacation then and did a lot of book-accumulating. (And I'm stretching out the telling of it, because I can and to make it slightly more interesting.)

These are books I got from a local library, mostly because it was right after a trip to a used bookstore. I love used bookstores, and nearly always find interesting things in them - but I never find just what I'm looking for. That's pretty much the deal with used bookstores, of course: you find what you find, and it is surprising and interesting. But, sometimes, you then need to go find the thing you just realized you really want to read next - or just do some more poking around serendipitously - and that was the reason for the library run.

Here's what I grabbed while I was there:

White Cat, Black Dog was Kelly Link's new short-story collection last year, her first in quite a while. (I want to say around a decade, but I think it's not quite that long; I read Get in Trouble in 2017, I think fairly soon after publication.) I wanted to get to it "soon" - like so many other things - but thought she was a slow, careful enough writer that I had some time...and then she dropped a long novel earlier this year. I'm thrilled to have more to read, but starting to get worried I'm falling behind - so it's time to read more Kelly Link stories.

Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of non-fictional writings about writing by the novelist Haruki Murakami; it's about two years old now. I've been reading his books since the mid-80s, and have mostly kept up - I still have his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, on the to-be-read shelf, since I haven't been up to a book that length for a while - and I've also mentioned many times that I, for whatever odd reason, really enjoy reading the random nonfiction of fiction writers.

Fly By Night is a standalone graphic novel set in New Jersey by Tara O'Connor, whose work I've never seen before. I found it randomly browsing the YA graphic novel shelves, another big benefit of poking your head into a library now and then. This seems to have monsters in it - real monsters, the kind that live in Pine Barrens - but I bet it also has some of the human kind as well.

Haruki Murakami Manga Stories is, I think, the second book with that title - there might be a discrete "2" on the spine, covered with library stickers, but I'm not seeing any other indication in the book that there was a previous Haruki Murakami Manga Stories (but there was). This one has three adaptations, by the same crew as last time (writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL), of Murakami short stories of various vintage.

And last was another random find: Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir, the book that makes me say "if your name has an unusual spelling, it would behoove you to make sure it's clear and easily readable on your book cover." (No one listens to me.) I think this might have been a webcomic or something, but I found it on the shelf as a book, noticed Top Shelf published it, and figured that was good enough to give it a whirl. It seems to be some kind of semi-autobio thing, but that's about all I know.