كانت جميلة بشكل لايصدق. كان شعرها طويل ومجعد، وكانت عيناها عميقة كالمحيط.

لا شك أن موراكامي يمتلك الوصفة السحرية لمزج الواقع بالخيال فينتج منهما المتعة , تلك لعبة يلعبها موراكامي بمهارة فائقة .

أدوات مميزة يعتمد عليها موراكامي في بناء قصصه و رواياته , لكن أكثرها سحرًا على الإطلاق هو حسِّه الموسيقي البديع الذي يُضفي به على أعماله لمسات رائعة تربط القصة في ذهن القارئ بما لازمها من مقاطع و سيمفونيات.

هذة القصة تنتمي للمدرسة البسيطة الرقيقة على خلاف عادة موراكامي الذي تعد رواياته من الروايات المعقدة لما يضعه فيها من اللامنطقية , الوضع هنا لم يكن على هذا النمط بل كان سير القصة متماسك و متجانس من البداية للوسط للنهاية برغم عنصر الخيال .

نجح موراكامي جدًا في تكوين قاعدة عريضة له من القراء في شتى أنحاء العالم , وقد لمسني بسحره منذ أول عمل قرأته له "كافكا على الشاطئ" و من يومها قد سرتُ في ركاب قافلة المحبين .

تجربة أخري لطيفة و ناجحة مع أعمال الروائي الياباني و كنتُ أتمنى لو طالت أكثر قليلا ليستمر السحر و تستمر المتعة .


شكرًا جزيلًا لصديقتي ندى خالد على الترشيح المميز :))


تمت
10-2-2017

There were some good stories, but overall I don't think Murakami is someone I would go to for short stories. He is terrible at conclusions for them, and only 1 or 2 stories left me wanting more. He is very very hit or miss with me and I'm finding a lot of misses with him lately. He has a very distinct style that shines through every novel he writes, but weirdly, I only like it sometimes.

١٠ قصص كل قصة تحفة فنية مجنونة اكتر من اللي قبلها ♥️

Review ASAP :). Mas para já, como decrever a minha primeira experiência com a escrita deste autor ? Inesperada, estranha, muito diferente e...muito boa!

What can I say about Haruki Murakami? He is famous, both in Japan and abroad, although in the States those who know him tend to be Literary Hipsters who are interested in Asia. He writes novels and short stories, although his novels tend to be a bit disjointed and episodic, hinged like a Jacob's ladder. His short stories will always employ a simile at the top of the second page which may seem at times deep and yet simple.

When I started reading The Elephant Vanishes, I wasn't really sure what I was getting into. The first story, "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women", is a good litmus test for the book as a whole: a man gets a strange phone call from a woman, fails to find his cat, and makes dinner. If this holds your attention, the book will be totally your thing. If the thought of listening to this narrator rattle on and on about the alleyway behind his house makes you cringe, you're better off going back for something else.

I'd divide the stories into two categories, the real and the magically real, and most of the ones that fall into the latter category ("Sleep", "Barn Burning", "A Slow Boat to China", "The Dancing Dwarf", and "The Elephant Vanishes") are among the best in the collection. Which is not to diminish the others - "The Silence", a story about a boyhood fight, is one of my favorites of the group, and definitely contains none of the surreal elements the others exhibit.

Murakami's narrators tend to be men and women in their early thirties, married or in a place where they feel they should be married but aren't, with families which seem largely inconsequential to the action. Over the course of any given story, they will generally make a similie, listen to music (classical and classic rock, generally), eat spaghetti, and have awkward conversations with people which may or may not be typically Japanese.

The thing is, despite the reviews on the back which claim that Murakami is showing "Japan as it's experienced from the inside", I don't see a lot of Asia here, at least not the Asia that I know and live in. The Japan portrayed here will be familiar to Westerners, because the strange emptiness the characters experience, the search for meaning, is the same in both worlds. This has some interest in itself, especially if you happen to be interested in the congruencies that have grown between cultures as a result of globalization (why do all his characters listen to Western music and read Western novels?).

In summary, read it for the spaghetti, read it for the magical realism. If you're looking for classical Japanese culture, go somewhere else.

n  n    «El nuestro es un mundo al que hay que dar cuerda, pienso. Una vez al día viene el pájaro que da cuerda y se encarga de ponerlo todo en orden».n  n

Reseña en español | Review in English (below)

n  El Elefante Desaparecen (象の消滅 Zō no shōmetsu) es una recopilación de diecisiete historias cortas escritas por Haruki Murakami entre 1980 y 1991, y publicadas por primera vez (en inglés) en 1993, y posteriormente en japonés en 2005. Como me suele suceder con este tipo de colecciones, me he encontrado con historias que me han encantado (“Sobre el encuentro con una chica cien por cien perfecta en una soleada mañana del mes de abril” o “Un barco lento a China” me han maravillado y me han recordado al primer Murakami que conocí gracias a  Norwegian Wood o Sputnik, mi amor), otras que me han sorprendido por una temática bastante surrealista y terrorífica (como “El pequeño monstruo verde” o “La gente de la televisión”), algunas que me han gustado por las implicaciones narrativas que tienen en las obras de mayor envergadura del autor nipón (como el relato sobre “El pájaro que da cuerda” que abre la colección), y otras, simplemente, que me han aportado poco o nada (“El enanito bailarín”, “Quemar graneros”, “Lederhosen”…).

Echo de menos que la edición española contenga algo más que una mera traducción de los relatos, ya que creo que si no eres lector(a) habitual de Murakami no entenderás ciertas referencias, personajes y temas que están presentes (de una manera u otra) en su suerte de universo literario. No sé hasta qué punto se ha llegado a analizar la obra del autor japonés, o si puede llegar a ser interesante estudiarla en su totalidad, pero a esta recopilación le encarece una buena introducción que complete los textos.

A diferencia de  Sauce ciego, Mujer dormida, no recomendaría esta colección a no ser que ya os guste alguna novela de Murakami y queráis seguir leyendo toda su, ya de por sí, extensa obra. Lectura obligada para rescatar narrativas de las obras más tempranas del autor japonés y para quienes tengamos esa fijación (casi enfermiza) en leer todo lo que escribe Haruki Murakami con una media sonrisa en la cara.

n  «Todas las cosas se perderán. Una detrás de otra. Eso es. Mi sitio tampoco es este. Perderemos las palabras, nuestros sueños se transformarán en brumas antes de desaparecer, como desapareció en algún momento nuestra aburrida adolescencia que parecía ir a durar toda la eternidad».n

————

n  n    «A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world».n  n

n  The Elephant Vanishesn (象の消滅 Zō no shōmetsu) is a collection of 17 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories were written between 1980 and 1991, and published in Japan in various magazines, then collections. The contents of the compilation were selected by Gary Fisketjon (Murakami's editor at Knopf) and first published in English translation in 1993 (its Japanese counterpart was released later in 2005). As usual with this kind of compilations, I have come across stories that I've loved (both "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" and "A Slow Boat to China” reminded me of the first Murakami I met through  Norwegian Wood or  Sputnik Sweetheart), others have shocked me with rather surreal or even terrifying themes (like "The Little Green Monster" or “TV People"), some I liked for the narrative connections within the larger works by the Japanese author (as the story of "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday's Women" that opens the edition), but others were honestly rather flat and I was unaffected by them ("The Dancing Dwarf”, "Barn Burning”, “Lederhosen”...).

I miss that the Spanish edition included more than a mere translation of the stories since I believe that if you are not a regular reader of Murakami you will not understand certain references, characters and themes that are present (in one way or another) in his literary universe. I do not know to what extent the work of the Japanese author has been analyzed, or if it can be interesting to study it as a whole, but this collection is worth a good introduction to complement the texts.

Unlike  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, I would not recommend this collection unless you already like Murakami and you want to continue reading all his (already large) work. Essential reading to rescue narratives of the earliest works of the Japanese author and for those of us who have an (almost sickly) obsession in reading everything that Haruki Murakami writes.

n  «Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leeching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn’t a place for me. That is how we we will loose our speech, now our dreams will turn to mist. The way our adolescence, so tedious we worried it would last forever, evaporated».n

ما سر ولع موراكامي بالأذن تحديداً أكثر من باقي الجسم؟!
قصة حلوة.
٥ يناير ٢٠٢٣♥️

There seems to be some kind of consensus among Murakami fans: rave about his novels, rant about his short stories. As for me, I'm just utterly confused (and terribly insecure) when it comes to publicly issuing an opinion.

The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of 17 short, brief and 'don't blink or you'll miss it'-length stories. Going through them, my enjoyment was constantly wavering between 3 and 5 stars, unable to fully commit to a rating. Yes... I frequently read books thinking about the GR rating I'll give them.



It started out quite badly, with the The Windup Bird and Tuesday's Women being basically a retelling of the first few chapters of The Windup Bird Chronicle. And by retelling, I mean 99.5% the exact same thing. Admittedly, there might have been a bit more detail about the mysterious call... but I kept wondering when I'll get to the "original" part.

This wasn't even the 'worst' of the stories: Kangaroo Communique, Fall of the Roman Empire and TV People (I can't even remember what Window was about) were completely meaningless to me. I suppose they're not bad as an exercise in writing random stuff, but I truly didn't get the point of any of the stories. Alternately they're so completely philosophical that my brain just didn't even try to understand any of it.



On the other hand, there were several stories that I did greatly enjoy: Sleep, Little Green Monster and Dancing Dwarf come to mind most prominently.

In Sleep we have a mother who has suddenly become unable to sleep, and re-discovers her long-forgotten passion for reading novels. Up until the very end, I was incredibly envious of her... especially as I was struggling to keep up with my yearly GR reading goal.

Little Green Monster is the one story that surprised me most. It deals with a little green... being, that somehow manages to enter a locked house, thus terrifying the shocked woman living in it. The story is only about 2 pages long, but I found myself waiting to see what either of two the characters would do with bated breath. It also poses a really interesting moral dilemma for the reader.



The Dancing Dwarf is a 'typical' creepy modern fairy tale, very similar to the tale of Rumpelstiltskin only much creepier and more graphic than the Grimm Brothers' version.

Score: 3.8/5 stars

Right after finishing it, I was seriously considering giving the book 5 stars. The last 5 stories were truly enjoyable, but then (uncharacteristically) I decided to give an individual rating to each story and calculated their median value.

Windup bird & Tuesdays women 2.5
2nd bakery attack 3.0
Kangaroo Communique 2.0
Seeing the 100% perfect girl 3.5
Sleep 5.0
Fall of the roman empire 2.7
Lederhosen 3.5
Barn burning 4.5
Little green monster 4.7
Family affair 4.5
Window 3.0
TV people 3.0
Slow boat to china 4.5
Dancing dwarf 5.0
Last lawn 4.0
Silence 5.0
Elephant vanishes 4.5
====================================
Result: an average rating of 3.81/5

A well-told eerie short story by Murakami. I'm impressed with how he has succeeded in making the reader speculate on the mysterious elements of the story, making good use of the idiom "the devil is in the details".


Arguing against the "serial killer theory"

The main theory that circulates on this story is that the mysterious boyfriend of the woman is in fact a serial killer - who I will henceworth refer to as the businessman as he is never called by name. I think the theory of the businessman being a serial killer is a flawed explanation overlooking some key elements.

One such key element is when the businessman says he works in the import-export business. When our main character mentions to the woman how her businessman boyfriend told him that he worked in foreign trade, she responds with:

"Well I guest he must be. He doesn't seem to be working anywhere. He meets a lot of people and makes a lot of phone calls".

Upon hearing this, the main character compares him to Gatsby:

Just like Gatsby, he thought. A young man who's a riddle.

Anyone's who's ever read Fitzgerald's great classic knows Jay Gatsby makes his dazzling fortune by being involved in crime. The relevance of this comparison is also a possible hint that our businessman character also has amassed his fortune by criminal means. There is a hint that he is involved in some sort of illegal activity when he and the main character smoke a joint and have a conversation about barn burning and the illicit nature of it:

"Of course it's illegal. Just like you and me sitting here smoking grass - definitely against the law".

People who interpret this story often seem to take the barn burning topic as a metaphor for the the businessman killing women. Yet, they seem to miss how he emphasizes his discreet and distanced approach to his barn-burning crimes:

"I pour on the gasoline, strike a match, and take off. Then I have a good time watching it all from a distance with binoculars."

That the businessman should literally burn his victims and watch from afar with binoculars obviously seems a too simple and unsophisticated explanation. If the supposed serial killer should, on the contrary, use other direct means of killing her, like strangling her, it contradicts what he is saying. It also doesn't support his previous statement moments before:

"Of course, I always choose one that won't turn into a four­alarm blaze. I don't want to start a fire—just burn down barns."

A fouralam blaze in the form of, for instance, widespread news coverage and a criminal investigation when the bodies of his victims are found - is something a serial killer would probably love. On the contrary the businessman gives the impression of discreetness; a man who likes to find himself in a comfortable distance to his crimes - with no fire and no trace.

My interpretation of the story

So if the businessman isn't a serial killer, what kind of crimes are he involved with - and what is an alternative explanation to the woman's "disappearing act"? I think him being in the import-export business, seemingly being wealthy without anyone in the story knowing what he does for a living and his taking pleasure in "barns burning" at a distance, hints at two possible explanations: a) him being involved in human trafficking or b) him being involved in organ trafficking.

What compliments this theory is also how the main character thinks it looks like the businessman has lived abroad. His human or organ trafficking lifestyle probably also forced him to live in and do business in other countries to allow for the seemingly inexplicable luxury of his young age:

He had the firm handshake of a person who'd lived abroad a long time.

Choosing to stick to the serial killer theory, some of the key elements of the story falls short. For instance, what is the relevance of the businessman having a mysterious job and source of wealth if he is a serial killer hunting poor women? If the woman is the victim, it's emphasized early in the story how she is almost broke and practically lives from boyfriend to boyfriend - or at least, this is what the main character thinks:

her income didn't amount to much. What it didn't cover, her boyfriends made up.

If the woman is near broke, the businessman earns next to nothing in material gains from killing her, contrary to the sinister act of involving her as a slave in human trafficking, or selling off her organs. The relevance of the Gatsby comparison in the story falls short too if the illicit activities the businessman is involved with aren't instrumental to his wealth amassment. It wouldn't be far-fetched to speculate that being in the business of importing and exporting organs globally would make for a wealthy evil-doer.

In addition, the businessman makes a point of targeting a barn (victim) every two months. Doing this out of twisted economic calculations seems plausible. A criminal seasoned in human or organ trafficking would probably have an idea of what each of the women('s organs) he sends off would earn him - resulting in this peculiar pattern. I think this makes more sense than simply feeding a serial killer craving so routine that it shows up with two-month intervals.

So there you have my theory. The beauty of this short story, and the wonderful film Burning, is that they can be dissected in so many ways.

apathetic

Every protagonist in Murakami's books (though, I've only read this and 'Norwegian Wood') are apathetic. They just float through their lives, never really caring about what is happening, or if there is anything they can do to fix it.
I think to some readers this could be quite tedious, but there is something real about these characters because of their apathy. Through the bizarre situations the characters face, the reader can relate on some level.

The first few stories did annoy me, as many of them didn''t seem to end properly. However I soon appreciated these stories for not being complete 'Disney-like' narratives where every story has to have a villain, and a happily-ever-after ending. Murakami finishes his story when he has nothing left to say. The characters flit through their lives, and Murakami flits through their stories. No need to ponder if you don't want to. Just take it or leave it. The perfect book for reading on a crowded bus, i thought.

The one thing that did bug me about this book was Alfred Birnbaum's translations. Some sentences I had to re-read in order to understand. The first few times I thought this was just due to the bumpy bus i often read this book on, but when it occurred only when I read his translations, I stopped blaming myself. Some sentences seemed like they weren't quite finished: the words were in English, but the sense was convoluted. He also occasionally uses 'trendy' words that, frankly, aren't all that trendy. I got the impression Birnbaum is not one who would often ride the bus to get places.
Whereas Murakami does take the bus, and quietly reads over your shoulder.

"Sleep" is one of the best stories I've ever read. I LOVE IT. I also love "Barn Burning" and "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women" (though neither quite reach the height and final impact of "Sleep"). There are others I like a lot ("TV People" and "Last Lawn of the Afternoon" (which could be a Ron Carlson story)) and then some that I enjoyed but didn't seem to add up to a whole lot and then a very few I actively disliked ("The Dancing Dwarf" and "The Little Green Monster"-- yick). In general: someone witnesses or is involved in an unsolvable mystery, which mystery then exacerbates (and becomes a metaphor for) their apathy/depression/alienation/existential loneliness. I think I like Murakami more in novel form-- it gives you time to sink in and really absorb the atmosphere-- but "Sleep," though-- man! Amazing story. Just keeps building and building and then, wow A++

Not only was the book amazing (I truly believe he can do no wrong), but one of my best friends and I saw an actual play of it several years ago at Lincoln Center. We had seats in the very front row. The play (as required, I'm sure) was balls-out crazy, all in Japanese, with a ticker doing subtitles at the the top of the stage. My memory sucks, but I think I recall a bunch of people with static-spewing TVs for heads, and some crazy shit with sideways sleeping people. Probably I should reread the stories and much more will come back to me.

It was one of those incredible New York nights, me and Joe and Murakami madness, all dressed up because we could, and then after the play it was raining, but not too hard, and it was spring and we were only about fifty blocks and crosstown from home, and our heads were so filled with that crackly, delirious intensity you get after experiencing something purely astonishing, so we walked, him in a bit of a suit and me in as close as I get to heels, these like hemp platform sandals which I still have and are tinged with mold from how soaked we got that night, slipping into each other and going over and over everything we had just seen, eyes huge and brains sizzling and rain everywhere and bliss.