After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

This is a collection of several short stories, all of which have loose connections to the earthquake in Kobe in 1995. I was a freshman in college in 1995 and have vague memories of the quake on TV, most of the news in the area I lived in being taken by the genocidal wars stemming from the break-up of Yugoslavia.  I am not a fan of short stories. I like to write them, because it is easy, but I do not like to read them, because they finish before they started.  All the short stories I've written were because I was too lazy to develop them into novels, or at least chapters of a novel.  It is much easier to hold the plot and characters of a short story in your head than the plot and characters of a novel (assuming at least 300 pages, as the publishers today seem to extort).

"UFO in Kushiro" is about a good looking guy who marries an ugly woman who then ends up leaving him because she says he is empty inside.  He goes to Hokkaido and another woman wants to make love to him but he is too depressed to get an erection.  He thinks on the meaning of life at the end. As if there was one to be had.

"Landscape with Flatiron" is about a runaway girl, who suspected her father wanted to have sex with her, but he never did, and lives as a grocery cashier with a young punk who thinks he know everything.  The only thing going for her in her life is meeting with a middle aged painter and making bonfires on the beach.

"Thailand" is about a Japanese doctor going to Bangkok to relax and having as a driver an immaculately groomed man in his 60s who is obviously gay and former gay lover of a Swedish gem dealer who apparently passed away from old age.  The doctor carries pain inside her and an old fortune teller from Thailand tells her how to get rid of it.

"Super Frog Saves Tokyo" originally published in GQ (why won't they publish me??) is about a giant frog fighting a giant worm below Tokyo in order to prevent and earthquake.  Also a tax collector without any life gets some hallucinations, but survives.

The last story "Honey Pie" is the longest and is again about the same theme Murakami keeps digesting, a young sensitive boy in love with young sensitive and beautiful girl, but the boy is too afraid to express his feelings because his self esteem is nil (for one reason or another, it doesn't really matter anyway).  The girl eventually finds a macho man to pound her, but eventually the macho either dumps her or she leaves, so she goes back to the sensitive boy who waited and tortured himself all these years for her.  And they live happily ever after.  No they don't.  Stories with characters like that usually end in separate asylums in real life.

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

 This is yet another book where the main love interest of the main character (named for a change!) commits a suicide!  Wow!  Murakami would have probably been censored today because so many of his leading women commit a suicide (one way or another, even if it is not explicit stated, it is strongly implied both here and in Sputnik Sweetheart). I wonder why this pattern in his works.  Maybe he had someone in his life whom he loved and who committed a suicide?  Or maybe he is killing off his leading ladies so he doesn't fall in temptation himself to leave his wife - sacrificing them and his own feelings symbolically. 

This is a great short book, in line with Murakami's personal writings on life, love, sex, growing up and finding one's places in the world.  Hajime and Shimamoto are hanging out as 12 year old children, although Shimamoto has one leg shorter than the other because of Polio.  They go to different schools and Hajime is too afraid to contact her and he has another girlfriend in high school Izumi, who doesn't want to have vaginal sex, although she is OK with HJs and BJs. Hajime eventually has a wild sex with Izumi's first cousin, and when Izumi finds out she breaks off all contact with him and isolates herself.  Later in life she becomes a scary spinster of whom children are afraid and she sends Hajime invitation for the funeral of her cousin who died young and unmarried. 

Hajime goes on to marry Yukiko after college, a daughter of a wealthy developer and shady speculator.  They have two children and Hajime opens two Jazz bars which become famous, but he has never forgotten about Shimamoto, and he follows a beautiful woman who is lame on the same leg one day, until an older man accosts him and offers him 100,000 yen to forget about the woman he followed. Eventually Shimamoto visits one of Hajime's bars, but never tells him anything about her past or how she makes money, although it is obvious that she lives in luxury without doing any work. 

Although Hajime cheated on his wife quite a few times, they were all physical, but with Shimamoto it is emotional too.  Shimamoto goes with Hajime to spread the ashes of her premature born baby in a river that flows to the sea, and then they spend one night in Hajime's cottage, making love and telling each other everything they wanted since they were kids.  Hajime promises Shimamoto that he will leave his family, children and everything for her.  The next day she is gone, and the allusion is that she committed suicide so that she doesn't ruin Hajime's existing life.  Yukiko first rejects Hajime and has him sleep on the couch, but eventually takes him back by the end of the book.

The theme here and in many other novels and stories (honey pie in After the Quake) is that a sensitive boy is in love with a beautiful and sensitive girl since they are children or teenagers, but doesn't do anything to tell her about his love, although he feels that she loves him too but is too afraid to lose what he has with her in case of rejection.  Eventually the beautiful and sensitive girl gets tired of waiting and goes off with the next guy who proposes to her, who is usually powerful, rich or otherwise blessed with societal success.  Then eventually the girl realizes that the power guy is not for her, or he dumps her for the next one, and then she goes back to her original love, who by now has spent most of his life pining for her and suffering and eventually they get together, in some way.

All of the above could have been completely and utterly avoided if the sensitive and beautiful girl expressed her love for the sensitive boy FIRST, and be the one who made the first move.  However, such idea seems to be a taboo nearing sacrilege in Japanese culture and psyche. Oh, well.

Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibston

 This is a short story and I might say, quite short, but still miles better than the movie with Keanu Reaves.  I have no idea why would the director of the movie ignore the grit and bile of the actual story and instead go for cheap tropes like making Lo Teks some kind of fighters against oppression when in the story they are just another criminal gang in Nightcity. 

The story starts when Johnny cannot get the information unloaded from the wet implant in his brain because the dealer that usually uses him for shuttling information realizes that it belongs to the Yakuza and he is more than happy to let Johnny take the fall instead of him as the Yakuza have another wat-grown ninja on the trail.

Johnny goes to the dealer to straighten things out, but the dealer and his bodyguard use nerve arrester which freezes Johnny until Molly Millions come along and kills the former two.  The Yakuza ninja is still on the trail so Molly takes Johnny to Nightcity where Dog Lo Teks, basically humans with dog implanted fangs and other parts, have their own society, part of which is fights in an arena of net of cables sprung out between tops of buildings.

The Yakuza ninja finds them here and Molly fights him in the arena, and although the ninja is maximum-enhanced for reflexes, strength and endurance, Molly manages to kill him, and he dies with an expression of surprise and disbelief on his face. Johnny stays with the Lo Teks and becomes one of them, his new bulldog fangs grafting just nicely in his jaw.

So much better than the movie.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

 This is a novella by Truman Capote, and since I was a fan of the film and Audrey Hepburn - I wanted to read the book.  It turns out the book is much better than the movie, even for Hepburn fans. I didn't understand from the movie that Holly is actually a call girl/high end prostitute, in a way, merging that role with a socialite.  Also I didn't realize that she was supposed to be 20 years old, as Hepburn was older when she played the role.  Capote said that his model for the character was blond, and he preferred if Marylin Monroe got the part.

Capote says that Holly Golightly is not a prostitute, but an American Geisha, though that distinction is largely lost in the 21st century.  Holly mentions that she slept with 11 men by the age 19, and that's without counting what happened before she was 13. 

Capote's language is beautiful, flowing, simple, yet conversational and full of slang and color.  I had to look up some terms, as the 1940s were a long time ago.  Completely opposite of the language William Gibson uses, so sparse and technical. 

The book perfectly describes a geisha, from a small town in the South, starving as a child, getting married at 14 to a much older man, but having sex before that.  Eventually she ends up in Holywood, being "sponsored" by O.J., a producer who wants to make an actress out of her and teaches her French.  She elopes for New York City where she becomes a "cafe girl", basically living off the tip money given to her by older, wealthy man, who claim to be in love with her.

The unnamed narrator lives in the same brownstone with her, and becomes her helper and confidant.  Eventually there is a scandal where she was transmitting information from a mobster in jail and she loses her Brazilian sponsor.  She goes to Brazil anyway and months later she sends the narrator a letter from Buenos Aires where she is "accompanying" an old rich man who is married and has seven children. After that the narrator doesn't here anything about her.

The novel is much more realistic and life-like than the movie, which changed several major plots and completely removed some others.  The narrator never ends up with Holly in the end like in the movie and his love is unrequited, which is one of the themes of the novel.

Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami

 This is a very short book, and I can see why Murakami didn't want his first two books translated into English, as, besides short, they are also not very structured and the plot is all over the place.  This book is even shorter than Pinball, 1973 and it doesn't have to do much with wind, except one random conversation.  The book happens while the unnamed narrator is back for a summer holiday from Tokyo at his seaside town.

Here he drinks at J's bar with "The Rat" who is from a rich family, older than the narrator and apparently has a fixation on an older woman.  The narrator remembers the three women he has slept with and the last of them committed a suicide, although nobody knows why.  He also finds a passed out woman in J's bar bathroom (seems bathrooms in Japan are unisex, who would have thunk it?).  He takes her home and notices she is missing the pinky finger on her left hand.  She strips naked while drunk and the narrator stays in her apartment to keep her from harming herself.  When she wakes up she accuses him of having sex with her while she was passed out and throws him out.

Eventually he finds her as a clerk in a record shop by the shore and they start seeing each other until one night she disappears and when he sees her again she told him she had an abortion.  He never sees her again after that night. 

The Rat wants to write novels, but he says he will not put sex or fights in his novels.  The narrator doesn't understand why not to include sex and fights when those are some of the most important events in human's lives.  

The narrator eventually moves to Tokyo permanently and gets married, while The Rat writes novels and sends him a manuscript each Christmas.