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all that is written here may contain unforewarned spoilers.
the elephant vanishes, haruki murakami
i will better organise this reading blog later, probably so that each review is given its own page. what i will do for this book, given that it is an anthology of short stories, is provide some short thoughts on each story in order, and then summarise how i felt about the work overall at the end (though i fear i may not have much to say at all).
the wind-up bird and tuesday's women: as i understand it, this is essentially just the first chapter of one of his longer novels (
the wind-up bird chronicle). i thought that this first chapter served its purpose as a short story fairly well on its own; if anything it makes me excited to eventually read the full work. one thing i will comment on
once and no more (you'll find no shortage of people who mirror this opinion) is that
i am still not a huge fan of how murakami portrays women. it is certainly one of the biggest gripes people have with him, and i do not think it is without any fair basis. in my case, i am able to mostly look past it (though truthfully it did ruin some of the later stories in this book for me), however i am beginning to sympathise with those who claim it to be 'unreadably abhorrent'.
the second bakery attack: i enjoyed this one a lot in spite of its mundanity. i enjoy how the situation plays out—especially how the only patrons at the mcdonald's are asleep for the entire robbery. this story was actually what inspired me to write my story
thumbprint, though the correlation may be quite unclear (i will not be explaining it).
the kangaroo communiqué: did not like this one. writing devices used—particularly the insertion of sound effects on separate lines to create suspense—felt amateur.
on seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful april morning: very short but sweet, i liked it. this one was also featured in the tiny book of his i own,
desire. somehow, even though it was basically pre-declared, i was still pleasantly surprised when the story ended with 'a sad story, don't you think?'
sleep: very interesting; felt as though it could have been one of the assigned texts in my current creative writing course. the brief mention of the car having issues starting up coming back at the end was very well done. at no point in the story did i consider that it would end in such a way, and the sudden shift in mood was exciting if not quite terrifying!
the fall of the roman empire, the 1881 indian uprising, hitler's invasion of poland, and the realm of raging winds: title is long as fuck. i think this one warrants a reread; i'm not really all too sure i've grasped its theme that well. overall, the impressions from my first read were, if i remember right, 'this was just pretty strange.'
lederhosen: short but good. very much enjoyed this one—is it wrong of me to not get offended by the depiction of the german accent? it's not something i gave a single thought to. cannot make much commentary on this one as it's pretty straightforward, but it's the sort of story i'd love to read to my writing class (because it's simple, and sort of funny; they'd eat it up).
barn burning: this was the first story in this anthology that i enjoyed
thoroughly. i've thought about it quite a bit since i first read it. first of all: i was not expecting
murakami to write about smoking weed so casually (i didn't know he got down like that). it said they were smoking something crazy from india; i can only imagine how smacked they were. getting serious again, the sudden jump to this guy (whose name i don't think we ever learn?) burning barns as a hobby was pretty interesting to me, and the way the story ends without it getting neatly tied up is perfect. all this is to say, yes i liked this one a lot.
the little green monster: did not like this one in the slightest. interesting idea, terrible execution.
family affair: it's very interesting to me that
murakami can write such misogynistic characters and still have me like them somewhat by the end of the story. i'm sure in real life i would hate this guy.
a window: this one did not stick with me.
tv people: certainly one of the stand-out stories for me. how bizarre, the whole thing! i think the more fantastical he writes, the more i tend to enjoy it (hopefully that is not a poor quality of mine). the ending was horrifying as well, and i enjoyed how the protagonist stopped narrating things neatly because he was trying to grasp the situation.
a slow boat to china: very interesting; packs themes of political unrest between china and japan very elegantly into a coherent story that does not seem immediately related. i enjoyed the mood throughout this one, especially the chapter about this guy's 'third chinese', who intrigued me quite a bit. it saddens me to write such short thoughts about these stories as i feel i have a fair bit to say about them, so perhaps in due time (and after some rereading) i will come back to append a bit more to those deserving.
the dancing dwarf: without a doubt the most fantastical story in this collection, and so as a matter of course i enjoyed it
thoroughly. laughed audibly when the line
We call working in the ear section "taking an ear break." came up. it filled my head with ideas for various stories of my own. i think it stood out as the strangest story in the book because at no point do we exist in any reality that could be described as 'usual'. every other story in this book, regardless of where we end up, starts pretty familiarly. when the dream about the dancing dwarf ended and he was like 'oh yes, time to go work another day at the elephant factory', i was like huh!
the last lawn of the afternoon: also very strange, though several degrees less so than the previous story. i think this story in particular was
extremely detailed, and i don't think i understood it all entirely. the entire time i was thinking 'is he going to sleep with this strange woman?' and i'd be surprised if the intent wasn't to have such a suspicion arise from the reader. the phone ringing in the distance, much like a previous anecdote he gives us... it's all quite intriguing. i enjoyed this one.
the silence: simple, nothing strange about it! even so, this one was a page turner, perhaps the most gripping story in this entire collection. the formatting was interesting; the story is first-person, but >95% of it is dialogue from another character recounting a story (also in first-person), and there are pretty much no breaks.
the elephant vanishes: the titular story! very interesting. can we assume that the elephant keeper did in fact somehow 'tip the balance' between his own size and that of the elephant in order to free it from the shackle? who fucking knows! probably not even
murakami himself (i'm joking around a little bit, i'm aware the ambiguity is the primary device in most of these stories). something interesting i caught immediately: the elephant keeper's name was
noboru watanabe, the very same name as the sister's fiancé in
family affair. i'm unsure whether this is relevant, or if it is a case of
murakami simply reusing a name (i sincerely doubt it).
overall, this is only the second
murakami book i've read, and is also (likely) the first collection of short stories i've ever read to completion. i am pretty glad to put it away in all honesty; i did not enjoy it nearly as much as
kafka on the shore, but it had its moments. the stand-out stories were
barn burning,
tv people,
the dancing dwarf,
the silence and
the elephant vanishes, to me anyway. i feel that the lack of a clear theme (besides perhaps elephants, which are present in all of two stories) is not so much of a detriment;
it seems all of murakami's stories, short or long, have reoccurring themes. i really do not have much else to say about this book, sorry. i'll be rating all the books on this page out of five stars from now on, and this one gets a two point five.
kafka on the shore, haruki murakami
excluding the '
the strange library' (a book short enough to read leisurely in a single sitting, possibly not elemental in my realm of potential reviews), '
kafka on the shore' was the first of
murakami's books i set myself the then-unknown pleasure of reading. i'm starting on this only minutes after closing the cover, and know all too well that there will come many novel thoughts days, weeks, months from now, but i've been redesigning my website and would like some content, no matter how meagre, to display here (all of this is to say that this review is very rushed and may not accurately portray my thoughts) (yes after having read through this review again, it kinda sucks. whatever).
i read this book by recommendation of my friend
seren. as may grow to become a pattern, i purchased this book from
unity, a wellington bookstore. be it an unneeded restriction, i don't care; i will only post reviews for books i own here, and in that way one should come to think of this page as a near-complete replica of my bookshelf. i have only
kafka and two other books, both unread, in my apartment. i have owned and read far too many books to attempt any sort of catch-up, so i will only review books i read or reread
after this website is deployed.
the first thing i'd like to do is discuss the characters we encounter in this book, starting with
nakata. i usually find it very hard to get attached in to fictional characters in any fashion; i am autistic (undiagnosed but it is almost a certainty in my mind). there were, however, a few characters in this book i found to be very endearing, and
nakata was one of them. i am unsure if i should be displeased with how he is portrayed, as he is disabled, and at times the way in which
murakami describes this can be jarring. i remember at least two uses of the r-slur, though since these uses were not violently derogatory nor did they steal anything from the writing i think i can reluctantly give them a pass (hey, this book was published in 2002) (also this is a translation so i'm unsure if he used such language in the original text).
nakata is possibly the deuteragonist of the story, he himself not existing titularly but still being the focus of one of the two main storylines we follow. i think he had a near perfect arc. all the characters i'll discuss (save for
kafka, whom fate was working for) were destined to become
cogs, pushing the story forward in an appropriate manner through any means.
nakata's involvement in this began far before the story's present day, which i think is interesting. his presumed life was almost entirely discarded in order to set events into motion far into the future. this is a
double-edged sword. on one hand, it sort of reads as though
nakata was supposed to have been
restricted in becoming intellectually disabled, which of course is fairly natural (define disabled). in general though, i dislike this sentiment in a way i can't quite get across at the moment. on the other hand, nakata is undoubtedly the
most proactive character in the entire book; the amount he gets done despite his cruel circumstances is staggering, and so i found myself proud for him.
very relevant to
nakata is
hoshino, who by the end of the book had grown to be one of my favorite characters despite his comparative mundanity. i think out of every character i saw myself in him the most, likely by way of his relationship with
nakata. he was ultimately lost, and he realised this towards the end of the book, but the spontaneous period of time he spent with
nakata shifted his world-view entirely. i haven't discussed themes yet, but it's no secret that this book centers very much around
fate. even though
hoshino was certainly fated to meet with
nakata to act as a vehicle in what
nakata felt (or knew) he needed to do, i'd also like to imagine that the two meeting played a key part in
hoshino's own fate. his being lost was only brought to his attention after he was made familiar with how
nakata operated, and, though at his roots he was much the same, we see how he has changed as a result of this at the end of the book. he realised that he had been going through life selfishly, but we can see from his helping
nakata that ultimately he is a good-natured guy, and so i think wrapping his arc up as simply 'helping this old guy made me realise i have the ability to be good, i recognise that the way i acted before was wrong' works out pretty beautifully.
oshima is interesting. in the modern day he is undeniably terrible transgender representation, what with he himself initially insisting on a male identity yet later seemingly stumbling on this. i could have also done without
kafka commenting on how sexually alluring his feminine properties were, though i suppose reading directly from
kafka's mind we're not kept from his intrusive thoughts (he seems to feel no remorse in having these thoughts though, instead relishing in them and fetishizing
oshima). again though, this book was published in 2002, and i think, regardless of result, not being queer yet writing a queer character is pretty interesting.
oshima, similarly to
hoshino, is lost. he describes his body as
an imperfect container for his mind, him being transgender as well a haemophiliac, and we see, much like
nakata, someone who is split in half. in his case he loves his own mind, but hates his own body. unlike
hoshino, he does not get a conclusion. this is quite sad in my opinion, but i don't necessarily think it is a bad thing.
oshima continually proves that, despite his circumstances, he has the strength to be resilient and wonderfully kind, and i really admire him for that.
saeki was almost nothing as a character, but this is understandable. i don't think she was meant to be anything more than another cog in the fate at play. she was
already dead—both literally and figuratively—as is drilled into us throughout the book's entirety, and this was reflected in how little she generally contributed to any given interaction. i may not have much to say for her, but one thing i would love to comment on is a writing technique i absolutely loved. the convergence of both storylines towards the end of the book is obviously very exciting regardless, but one thing i noted was how, where previously we received speculative descriptions from
kafka, we instead received definite statements from the omniscient third-person in regards to
saeki and
oshima's thoughts. i'm unsure how noticeable this is supposed to be but i caught onto it immediately, and it helped me humanise her a little more.
when it comes to
kafka, i have surprisingly little to say. sure he was the 'main' character, but i found him to be somewhat bland in all honesty. he can't even use the same excuse as
saeki in this regard, as he was very much alive throughout the book. despite his being counterpart to
nakata, who rather cruelly had most of his character stripped in his becoming a device for fate, i still found
kafka to be far more devoid of anything quote unquote relatable. this isn't to say that i disliked him at all, i just didn't find myself worried for him. when
nakata died, i understood it to be necessary but i was still saddened. if
kafka had died at the end of the book, i would have been moreso interested in the implications of his death than saddened by it. the
boy named crow, who initially i had presumed to simply be
kafka's internal monologue, i grew to treat as a personification both of
kafka's curse and of
his will against it. it is pretty on the nose, after all
crows are symbolically birds of death but also notably
not symbols of bad luck. neither good luck nor bad luck had any part in
kafka's arc; everything that happened was set to happen exactly as it did from the very beginning. it is interesting that it is stated within the book that
kafka's name means crow in czech, because this is straight up just a lie. in fact,
kafka does not mean crow in any language as far as i can tell. one interesting thing about his name though, which i might be reaching a bit in declaring, is that phonetically in japanese it could be written
可不可, which, while not a set phrase, could sort of be like 'might be, might not be'. this would be pretty apt.
touching on
themes, i think, and you'll likely find this echoed online i'm not sure, that this work is
entirely malleable. it has concrete topics, but the conclusions a reader may draw at the end of the book would be wildly varied i should think. in my eyes, it is merely describing
determinism. we see throughout the entire book events that are so comically convenient to the plot that i really cannot sum it up in any other fashion.
hoshino 'just so happens' to stumble across one
colonel sanders (that's right, like the kfc guy) who rather nicely 'just so happens' to know the exact location of a random nondistinct stone? i should declare that at no point did i ever think these sorts of things were lame.
kafka on the shore isn't necessarily describing a
hard determinism, rather a sort of
cosmic determinism. things should be a certain way, but they have the ability to wander from it, and whenever this does happen, for the better or the worse of any pertinent person, they will return to the cosmically defined course. during this process, things may occur that are beyond our pedestrian understanding. this leads to the book's wonderful dreamlike sequences which seem to bend reality to the point of nearly breaking. we are made aware of
kafka's curse in the very first chapter, and by the end of the book it has transpired entirely, leaving him broken. i do not think that this is a sad ending. as
saeki said,
kafka has the ability to go on living. the completion of his curse is simply something that has happened in his life, and in the end he has stepped into a
brand new world.
i did not find a lot of the prose in this to be all too beautiful, unfortunately. it would have been awesome if it had a super excellent translation, but it's fine. the merit of this story, at least in the english version, certainly lies in the storytelling. this isn't to say there weren't lines i quite liked; '
streetlights alongside the road that stretch off into the distance as if they'd been set down to measure the earth' jumps to mind. the imagery, even when described generally, is also extremely awesome most of the time. visions filled my head my entire time reading, and i did wonder how differently i might have imagined these scenes when compared to other people. i very much enjoyed the personification of
kafka's curse we very briefly get in the latter half of the book. i can't quite recite it from memory, but i remember it was described as being very
dark and heavy, and that it
lay quietly in wait. in the second to last sequence we also get what is almost certainly a reference to
the story of lot's wife, which i mean hey, where do you think i got the name
lottie from?
i am unsure if it is a fault of the translation, but i don't think
murakami strives when writing urgency. the beginning of
hoshino's final battle is haunting; i genuinely felt some sort of fear knowing there was some
thing sharing the room with
nakata's corpse. when this played out though, it was pretty disappointing for me. there was no sense of panic;
hoshino literally leaves the room and returns multiple times with no consequence. this is more of a personal gripe though, i can certainly see that perhaps it was intended to be read this way. i'm just saying i didn't enjoy it. as i've said before though,
hoshino's arc ended so perfectly, and his adoption of
nakata's ability to converse with cats? perfect as fuck. it just further renders him as a sort of disciple to
nakata. i would genuinely read an entire book just about
hoshino going around and testing out his new power, i love that guy.
all in all though (i will likely come back and edit this review countless times, i recognise that it's fairly short and that i've omitted quite a lot of potential thoughts),
i loved this book. it is the first book of reasonable length i have read in quite a long time, and i don't think i could have chosen anything better. i intend to read the rest of
murakami's work, at least all that is available to me. there is a book by him,
猫を棄てる, which as far as i understand does not have an officially published english format. i had started translating it myself a while ago, but ran out of steam. if i ever finish i will make sure to post it in its entirety here.