by Jesse Kalvitis

I’m gradually reading my way through Murakami’s body of work but in no particular order. This collection contains stories written between 1983 and 1993, all translated into English, some previously published. It’s interesting to read these samples of some of his earlier short works, having already read his later writing. More on that in a moment.

Let’s be honest here. It’s impossible to read Murakami’s stories or novels without getting the impression that he is a delightfully odd man. His characters, while made entirely relatable by the use of interior monologue, by their common human traits and experiences, are constantly in touch with the more mystical, bizarre side of the universe. Phone calls full of nothing but rushing wind come into one character’s life, weeks of inexplicable insomnia into another’s. In the title story, a full grown elephant does, in fact, vanish. These events are remarked upon but taken with a certain calm bafflement by the characters. The simple, honest weirdness of Murakami’s world reminds me of the fiction of WVU’s own Shane Stricker, but also of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, genre-straddling authors who found literary merit on the fringes of science fiction and horror.

I accidentally found out a little about Haruki Murakami himself while confirming the timeline of his publications. I generally try to avoid learning too much about the personal lives of my favorite authors. I find it difficult to enjoy a story or novel if I have learned that the author’s a real jerk. In this case, that wasn’t a problem. What I did discover is that Murakami may possibly be as odd as his writing. He only started writing fiction in 1979, at age twenty-nine. He experienced a moment of inspiration while attending a baseball game, and went home to immediately start writing a novel. At the age of thirty-three, he began running marathons and participating in triathlons. He eventually ran a 62 mile ultramarathon around Lake Saroma. Before his late twenties, he mostly devoted his time to music, specifically jazz. He worked in record stores, and he and his wife ran a coffee shop and jazz bar in Tokyo.

I am fascinated by Murakami’s reinvention of himself at the age when many people are beginning to settle into one particular field, one track. This openness to change shows up in his writing as well. Many of his characters exude a sense of frustration and wonder, willingly entering in to the strange avenues opened up by events beyond the norm. The primary example of this, of course, is the protagonist from his novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, in which an unemployed young husband finds himself the center of an increasingly peculiar series of events. I read the novel a few years ago and was delighted to find a short story in this collection that parallels the events of the first several chapters. In the short story version, the protagonist is far less reflective, less distressed by what he perceives as his sudden pointlessness in life. The deeply mystical elements of the novel don’t enter in at all—the story looks mostly at the protagonist’s relationships and home life. It’s actually one of the more ordinary stories in the collection. I can’t imagine the authorial mental leap that took this narrative from one form to the next, but I’m glad that it happened. I’m perfectly content if Haruki Murakami keeps on being as weird as he wants to be, and creating the intensely beautiful writing that comes with it.