First Person Singular: Haruki Murakami's proustian prose
I once asked a Haruki Murakami reader, where would you place his books? Not Harold Bloom but equally opinionated, the faithful reader immediately replied, and added, “Magical realism; the plots are plausible, yet they are not.” He, of course, was referring to the absurd scenarios in Murakami’s stories made superbly feasible by his elegant storytelling; for example, A Shingawa Monkey (2006), in which a monkey from one of Tokyo’s special wards steals names of young women whom he desires. I refer to this essay only because the monkey and its story reappear in this collection. There are e...