A superlative display of a great writer’s wares. Absolutely essential.
Unrequited or lost love, unrealized dreams and bizarre experiences that unfold into deeper mysteries, in 25 stories drawn from the prominent Japanese writer’s entire career.
A handful seem too thinly developed to make an impression: memories of high school and youth heightened by a pop song’s imagery (“The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema”); a satire on rampant commercialism and consumer gullibility (“The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes”); an obsessive daily routine through which a lonely bachelor avoids “getting caught up in other people’s messes” (“The Year of Spaghetti”). But more often than not, Murakami’s matchless gift for making the unconventional and even the surreal inviting and gratifying creates hard little narrative gems. In the beautiful title story, a young man’s paternalistic relationship with his ingenuous cousin (who has sustained permanent hearing loss) becomes the avenue to a more intense awareness of both others’ sufferings and his own alienated state. A nightwatchman sees his doppelgänger in “The Mirror” (which isn’t there, as he very well knows), and understands that he has somehow failed or antagonized his essential self. The vacationing narrator of “Hunting Knife” experiences several odd encounters at a tourist hotel, climaxing in a conversation with a wheelchair-bound young man whose possession of the title object amounts to a silent, secret rebellion against his fate. Successive images of loss or regret or alienation are dramatized in brisk sentences that decline to offer rational explanations, yet tease us with the manifold implications of things left unsaid. Murakami’s well-known love of American jazz and nostalgic fascination with the 1960s sound recurring themes, and he’s often present, under his own name or as “the writer.” These techniques work to perfection in a virtuosic exploration of the phenomenon of coincidence (“Chance Traveler”) and a searching Kafkaesque parable about disappearance, loss and coping (“Where I’m Likely to Find It”).
A superlative display of a great writer’s wares. Absolutely essential.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4461-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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