"Flash Fiction" by James and Denise Thomas

This was the required reading book for my Junior Creative Writing class in college.  I never finished reading it then, and didn't find the time to do it in the following 13 years or so... until now.  All of the stories are 750 words or less.  It has become a kind of a fad in the last decade for notable magazines to put very short word limits on accepted fiction work, like 1200 words, or 900 words or even 750 words.  I never believed that one could express proper emotion and build proper characters in such short space.  The only thing you could do in such short space is write "mood pieces", a bit in Rimbaud style, a bit like emotional safety valve going off in a more-or-less connected and relevant emotional rambling.  For the most, it is true of the stories in this book.  These are the kind of fiction stories one might find inside general interest magazines or tabloids.  Not too much time investment, but still a certain payoff for reading them.  Writing short-short fiction requires meticulous planning - or none at all. It depends.

There are some definite gems in this collection.  Some of my favorites are:  232-9979, Subtotals, How to touch a bleeding dog and Deportation at Breakfast.  Still, it is difficult to get emotionally involved and dis-involved (in order to move to the next story, the next involvement) in only 750 words.  A writer can write for a certain word length (comics authors do it all the time, and the outcome is good), but that does not give the writer the freedom to let the imagination flow, there are limits, artificial ones that stifle and smother.  That is not the way.  If a writer expresses a full emotion or idea and the result happens to be under 750 words (very unlikely) then so be it, but the word limit should never be one of the starting parameters of a work of art.  This book can be read over many days, and that is probably the way to do it, but in that way it is easy to forget it it, and remember it 10 years later.  You can also read it in one day, a few hours, but then it results in a jumble of images and emotions in your head.  I am not sure which is worse.

"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami

One of the last Murakami's books, it is also one of the more experimental ones.  Though "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles" has plenty of riddles and points left for the reader to figure them out, in "Kafka on the Shore" one feels that this kind of structure is taken to the next level where it forms the basis of the entire book.  It is a story of Kafka Tamura and Satoru Nogata, two lines of narrative that intertwine and depend on each other without the two characters ever actually physically meeting.  Murakami has mixed some US army reports from the occupation period of Japan about mysterious occurrences which have to do with the story, but also to remind the Japanese reader about that psychologically painful period in Japanese history which some contemporaries refuse to believe it ever happened, as does one of the characters in the book.

The first 300 pages seem to talk about unconnected events and some parts are so meticulous in details (like Kafka washing himself, pointing to every body part as he goes over it) that to the the Western reader, used to instant-everything and "jumprightintotheaction" narratives it might be unnerving, but, in classical Murakami style, everything comes together in the last 100 pages in a brilliant and fascinating way.  One of the main story lines is the Oedipal myth, where the 15 year old Kafka Tamura has sex with a woman who could (and yet, also does not have to) be his mother.  He also has sexual encounters with a much younger woman, Sakura, who could be his sister, but yet, does not have to.  There are strong sexual descriptions, typical for Murakami, who wants to shake up the Japanese conservative establishment.

The second main theme is the connection of the human with the spiritual or otherworldly, drawn mostly from Shinto worldview of spirits, both in woods and in cities, and gateways through to the other world hidden in special stones, forest clearings and deep woods guarded by entities which are more concepts than anything else.  This view is contrasted by the everyday reality of boring jobs, city lives that go nowhere, and work/life routine that kills the spirit of the human being, one atom at a time.  However, "Kafka on the Shore" is also an uplifting book, hinting at ways of finding oneself in the modern world as well, as long as one stays true and close  to certain symbols and meanings that make the difference between and empty, routine life, and life filled with meaning and excitement.