Impressive for its imaginative power but entirely too long and mundane in sections. Tengo and Aomame aren't interesting enough characters to warrant 1100 pages, but Murakami does paint an impressive portrait of quotidian 1980s Japan. The allusion to Orwell isn't necessarily relevant, and the fant...
Novella met typisch Murakami verhaal, over een jongetje dat in de bibliotheek wordt opgesloten door een vreemde oude man die hem drie ingewikkelde oude boeken laat lezen om vervolgens na een maand zijn hersenen te kunnen opslurpen. Hij wordt bewaakt door een schaap man en krijgt te eten van een b...
Something every Murakami fan should get around to reading. The greatest delay for me was the price, given its packaging I couldn't even look inside! However, since price shouldn't play into the rating the bottom line is that if you enjoy Murakami's prose you'll really like this. The accompanying ...
Магията на тази много кратичка история е в гладката хартия, илюстрациите, печатът, мирисът на библиотека и ужасяващия мрак на самотата. Две предупреждения: Първо, не се изкушавайте да я четете в електронен формат, и второ, нека тя да не е първата ви среща с Мураками - преди тази книга трябва мног...
The Strange Library is a beautifully presented short story, displaying Murakami's gift for invention and narrative pace. Some familiar Murakami tropes appear - the Sheep Man returns, the subterranean setting is reminiscent of the underground world of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the girl wouldn't b...
I loved this book. For me, reading Murakami isn't so much a pleasurable read as a transformative read -- after reading one of his books I always feel a little bit different. This one was every bit as difficult and engaging as other books but was more grounded. It still had that ethereal, dreamy s...
It surprises me when I read a book by Haruki Murakami and I am taken over by it. There is a disturbing amount of repetition in his novels--of characters/themes/plot elements/etc.-- and yet they generally feel new and fresh. This is the case with Colorless Tsukuru. Tsukuru was part of a close-knit...
Haruki Murakami's works are magic. I don't understand some of his books. But this particular short story is fabulous. When you go to unfamiliar place, you can't get out nor find a way to get out from that particular town. In my opinion, while we are still alive, we will see or know things even so...
A clever and fun reversal of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." The opening scenes are the most enjoyable when Samsa explores and copes with the deficiencies of his new human body. I noticed some reviewers lamenting the fact that this is a short story instead of a full novel, but I disagree. There's...
أغلب اصدقائي بدأوا الريفيو ب"ناكاتا ليس ذكيا"و"عقل ناكاتا لا يحتمل كل هذا"..حسنابعد قراءة الاحداث الغرائبية بل والسريالية احيانا, أشعر بـ انني قد تحولت الي ناكاتاإنها قصه كافكا الشاب الذي هرب من بيت أبيه هربا من لعنة سوداء ستتحققوناكاتا العجوز الذي يحب الحنكليس ويتحدث الي القطط ويبحث عن نصف ظله ا...
Sometimes I feel so - I don't know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space with no idea where I'm going."Like a little lost Sputnik?"I guess so. . . *****One of the reasons why I...
Goddammit. I really wanted to hate this book. There's so much about it that I abhor, but I can't bring myself to give it less than three stars.Sometimes, I joke with my sister that she needs to expand her character repertoire. Usually, her stories feature a nerdy, lonely, odd teenage boy who's ho...
This is not an easy book to read, review or discuss. You will either love it or hate it (more likely - never read it). I liked it. The swirling, kaleidoscopic imagery with freely overlapping of the physical and the metaphysical, the real and the imaginary, the utterly sane and the completely cuck...
So here’s the thing about Haruki Murakami that turns my brain into fairy floss: how is it that this 60ish Japanese guy writes in such a way that I feel he is exploring not only his own psychic underworld, but also mine? (I should mention here that I am not likewise a 60ish Japanese guy.) Given hi...
There are six separate stories in this slim title. There are no similar characters but all these stories mention [some in passing, and others with more importance:] the last big earthquake at Kobe, Japan.Murakami is like this. Everything happens as before, nothing extraordinary, just some normal ...
I have finally read a Murakami. I picked this up on a market stall and didn't realise it was part of a series until I listed it on GR and saw "The Rat, #4", but it works as a standalone story, albeit an intriguingly odd one. In conjures exciting unease and bafflement. It is a book of paradoxes an...
When I read my first Murakami, a compilation of short stories called "After the Quake," I was amazed by his refreshing originality. Some of his stories, indeed, had the effect of an earthquake to me. There were jolting, sudden and unexpected turns. In one, a man and a woman, after a brief introdu...
I just finished reading this book a few days ago. In fact, I've finished it three times in the past couple of weeks. Hear the Wind Sing is, alas, almost impossible to buy, unless your name is Rockefeller or Gates. My friend from Taiwan raved about it - a Chinese translation - saying it was way be...
"Pinball, 1973" is Murakami's second novel, and one that hasn't been released outside of Japan... the only available translation is for Japanese students learning English, and the version I read was based on that one.Is that perhaps why this Murakami book felt different to me? The book was less p...
Un desencantado treintañero, superviviente de su propia juventud, tiene con un socio más o menos alcohólico una pequeña agencia de publicidad y traducciones. En una de sus campañas publicitarias ha publicado una fotografía que lo pondrá en el punto de mira de un poderosísimo grupo industrial, ver...
Kaoru sits at the computer looking grumpy. The liquid crystal monitor shows videos taken by the security camera at the front entrance. The image is clear. The time of day is displayed in a corner of the screen. Checking her penciled notes against the time on the monitor, Kaoru uses the mouse to m...
Yokoyama was born in 1963 in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. He was 31 at the time of the attack. A graduate in Applied Physics from Tokai University Engineering Department, he took employment with an electronics firm, only to leave after three years and take vows. Of the five perpetrators, ...
It was only to be expected, as he barely ate. Since childhood his face had been full, if anything, but now he became wasted and gaunt. Tightening his belt wasn’t enough; he had to buy smaller trousers. When he undressed, his ribs stuck out like a cheap birdcage. His posture grew visibly worse, hi...
He grew up in Kobe and graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), won him the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers. This novel, together with Pinball 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), for which he won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writ...
And the less I liked him, the more doubts I had about her. I was disappointed in her for the choice she had made. Maybe I’m just narrow-minded. My sister certainly seemed to think so. We didn’t talk about my feelings, but she knew I didn’t like her fiancé, and she let her annoyance show. “You’ve ...
El conductor del camión no se explicaba cómo no había pisado el freno tratándose de una pendiente con tan mala visibilidad, y declaró que lo único que se le ocurría es que fuera cosa del diablo. Dick North también tenía su parte de culpa: antes de cruzar miró hacia la izquierda, pero tardó demasi...
I stayed up until midnight, reading, listening to music, and waiting for her, but finally I gave up and went to bed. I fell asleep with the light on. It was six in the morning when I woke. The full light of day shone outside the window. Beyond the thin curtain, birds were chirping. There was no s...
The park is a small one on a narrow strip of land in the middle of the city. Set near an old public housing project, it has a playground in one corner with swings, seesaws, and a water fountain. Mercury lamps illuminate the area. Trees stretch their dark branches overhead, and below there are den...