haruki murakami the wind up bird and tuesday's women

haruki murakami the wind up bird and tuesday

Centering around a couple who wakes up ravenous after midnight and decides that the only way to satiate that hunger is by robbing a bakery, this tale is one of the quirky (Symbolic? Metaphoric?) ones about escaping from responsibility. ‘The Second Bakery Attack’ is the second story in this collection. This short story is a slightly varied version of the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and is also one of the best here for it is the closest to the brilliance Murakami emanates in his novels-a definite favourite for me. The Elephant Vanishes begins with ‘The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women’, a surreal tale about the apathetic protagonist looking for his wife’s missing cat, their gone-stale marriage, the strange women who keeps calling him and the stranger encounter he has in the lot of an abandoned house-a combination (though not a hundred percent exact for his other works) Murakami is famous for with stellar examples being South of the Border, West of the Sun, A Wild Sheep Chase and Kafka on the Shore. I can’t get close enough to the core of fire because there’s something in between of us.

My wings are singed and my antennae has melted but I don’t feel the desire to completely hand myself to the flame that is the short story. On the other hand, with Murakami’s short stories, I’m constantly left unsatisfied. Perhaps you don’t know why but you’re enthralled-so deeply that all you can do is allow yourself to get as close as possible, risking singed wings and melted antennae…maybe you’ll even allow yourself to be wholly consumed by the flame. With them, you are the moth to their fire. And so, it is with profound sadness that I have to say that Murakami belongs to this category.įor me, Murakami’s novels are equivalent to that one person whose air is thickly shrouded with mystery. However, while some authors are practically Merlin with novels, they lack the expertise in expertly transfiguring a limited amount of words into a short story that has equal brilliance to their novels. Known to make the ordinary extraordinary and to coerce (without trying to reach beyond the words in his stories, really) the reader to look underneath the underneath’s underneath, Murakami’s novels works never fail to either take away one’s breath with its unique brilliance or befuddle one’s brain with its lack of conventionality. The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of short stories by one of my top favourite authors, Haruki Murakami. Warning: Super Long Review! Skip to ‘TL DR’ after the first two paragraphs if desired/in order to avoid spoilers.

Genre(s): Fiction, Short Stories, Asian Literature

Haruki murakami the wind up bird and tuesday's women