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.

Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami

This is the second book Murakami ever wrote, although for some reason I thought it was the first. Hear the Wind Sing is the first one and it is even shorter than this one, while both are shorter than even the shortest Murakami novel I've read so far - After Dark. 

As usual with Murakami, the novel is narrated from a first-person perspective by an unnamed narrator, however this is the second book of the "Rat Trilogy" so the Rat was already introduced in the previous book and in this one he is sleeping with a girl that he bought some stuff from, but is actually infatuated with another girl who lives in an apartment next to a beach and gets beach sand in her balcony.

J is also here, the Chinese owner of a bar where the narrator and the Rat go often. J is in his forties and usually doesn't volunteer information about himself, seeing as non-Japanese Asians in Japan cannot become citizens.  

The narrator works as a translator with a friend of his, him doing the English translations and the friend doing French.  He drinks often and sleeps with girls, eventually waking up in between twin girls who stay in his apartment for the duration of the novel, but whose real names we never learn.

The narrator start playing pinball on this very specific machine that he calls Spaceship, but eventually the arcade place is closed and the machine taken away, but he spends years trying to track it until he finally succeeds.  He tracks a collector who bought the machine from scrap and has it along with over 50 others in an abandoned chicken refrigeration warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo. When he finally finds the Spaceship, he just talks to her as if to a woman, but doesn't play.

The twins eventually decide to leave and the narrator continues with his life. People call this kind of novel "a slice of life".

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

 This is also one of the shorter Murakami novels, although he mostly writes very long ones, like his last one Killing Commendatore.  At around 200 pages it is just a little bit longer than After Dark, which was so far the shortest novel I read by Murakami.  Sputnik is related to the Russian satellite, but also on mispronunciation of Beatnik by Miu, the love interest of Sumire, a college-age girl who realizes she is a lesbian, or at least in love with an adult women, as Miu is near 40, if the two can be equalized.

 The unnamed narrator in first person, as usual with Murakami, at least we have the first letter of his name - K, tells the story of the book, mostly about his unrequited love for Sumire.  They went to college together and although K became a teacher, a reasonable job with a future, Sumire dropped out and wanted to become a writer, living in a tiny old apartment, with nearly no possessions or clothing or food.  Sumire calls K on the phone almost every night at 3am and they talk until the morning.  K wants Sumire sexually and romantically, but she has never shown any sign of such interest in him, only platonic, though thorough friendship.

Sumire falls in love with Miu, who is Zainichi Korean, which is significant for those who know the background.  They travel around the world, K wondering how to come physically closer to Sumire (while sleeping with other women), while Sumire wondering how to start a physical relationship with Miu, who in turn had something unnatural happen to her 14 years ago which left her with her hair all white and unable to have sexual desire or physical sex. 

The novel is about loneliness and the transformation of that loneliness into something less painful.  Loneliness can be present even when one is surrounded by other people and doing all the social activities and relationships a "normal" human is expected to be doing.  

Sumire eventually disappears on a small Greek island the night after she makes a physical advance towards Mui whose body rejects her.  K goes to the island to help Mui where she tells him her story and Sumire's story while they were together. Nobody can find Sumire or her body anywhere and eventually both K and Miu go back to Japan.

The book emphasizes that even when great events and great pain and loss happens in people's life, eventually they still go to the everyday routine and try to forget or ignore the pain as best they can, looking outwardly normal and well-adapted.

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

 This is the last book Murakami published (2017) and is one of the largest he wrote. It is more on a meta-level having to do with Ideas and Metaphors (and the scary, dangerous Double-Metaphors).  Descriptions of the book insist on relating it to "The Man in the White Subaru", but that is just one of the side threads, and these people who wrote the descriptions either did not read the entire book, or didn't understand it. 

The main character is a painter who makes a living painting commercial portraits for executives, which require very little creativity.  His wife of 6 years leaves him for another man and he moves out.  First he drives around Northern Japan, where he meets The Man with the White Subaru and the skinny girl who wants him to choke her during sex.

Eventually he settles in the abandoned house on a top of a mountain of the great Japanese painter Tomohiko Amada where he discovers an unknown painting of his called "Killing Commendatore." After hearing a bell at night and excavating a Buddhist pit on the property, he is visited by an Idea in the form of 2-foot Commendatore who eventually has the main character kill him in front of the near-comatose Tomohiko Amada (who was tortured by Nazis/SS in Austria during the Anschluss).  

There is a Menshiki character involved, who lives in a huge white mansion across from the main character, drives Jaguars and has some kind of a shady past.  He bought the mansion to observe a 13-year old girl living across the house, Mariye, who might or might not be his biological daughter.  Menshiki joins the main character in exploring the pit, and then having him paint his portrait and the portrait of Mariye, in order to get closer to her. 

Things get hairy with lots of twists and turns, as in most Murakami books, there is even a fantastic trip underground through the "Path of the Metaphor", however eventually many things get unresolved.  We never learn who is the Man in the White Subaru or the girl in the love hotel who likes choking during sex.  We never learn what happens with Menshiki and Mariye, and the main character getting back with his former/estranged wife Yuzu who had a child by another man is very unpersuasive. 

It seems that the book is more of an exploration of Ideas and Metaphors and the creative process, rather than a book about characters and their lives.  The best parts are those that remind of the Wind-Up bird chronicle, like the pit and the going through the tunnel to be reborn in the pit itself.  It is quite a long book and some parts are really meta to such a level to be almost unreadable, which is very rare with Murakami's books.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

 The best thing about this book is that I got introduced to Curtis Fuller and his amazing composition "Five Spot After Dark".  I also listened to other albums by him, and although the completely Free Style Jazz is not exactly my style, he has some amazing compositions like his rendition of "Besame Mucho" which sounds amazing on a trombone and "Autumn Leaves" which is also great.  I never knew that Jazz Trombone could sound this good, and I thank Murakami for introducing me.  Murakami owned a Jazz cafe in Tokyo for many years, and his depth and breadth of knowledge of Jazz, but also Classical, Opera and Rock classics like Bruce Springsteen is mind-boggling.  I learned more about American and European music from Murakami than from any other American or European author.

This is one of the shortest books Murakami wrote, and arguable one of the weakest one, content-wise.  The plot is very undetermined.  It all happens during one single night in Tokyo, every chapter happening at a different hour of the night.  Two sisters, Eri and Mari are the main characters, so to speak.  One is a beauty while the other is a nerd.  One is asleep during most of the book and some weird things happen with the TV in the room which is not her room, while the other is spending the night around Tokyo, waiting for the first morning trains to start running.

There is a love hotel manager, who is an interesting character, but too little time is spent on her.  There is an aspiring trombonist who practices most of the night, a 19 year old Chinese prostitute who gets beaten up and Chinese mafia in Japan involvement with a night office worker (salariman) who has a secret life on the side.  The parts about the sleeping Eri are probably the weakest. The perspective is not first-person, as in most of Murakami's books, but more like a movie expositions, with descriptions of the camera movement and angles, which, although new, did not work for me.

Ultimately, the book is a love poem to Tokyo at Night, the city where Murakami spent most of his life, although he was born in Kyoto.  The characters are much more forgettable than in his other books, but if one takes Tokyo to be the main character of the book, than things make more sense on a certain meta-level.