Word: haruki
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Anthologies tend to lend themselves to filler, but not one of the stories included in The Best American Short Stories disappoints. In a year of monster tomes--Don DeLillo's Underworld, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles--this collection shows that the short story promises to outlive the long novel for good reason...
...because of Dellio's success that Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicle, a hefty 611 page work of near genius, probably won't get the attention that it deserves. Although it spans a comparatively short six months in 1984, beginning with a Japanese thirty-something making a spaghetti breakfast to the beat of Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie," The Windup Bird Chronicle is a noirish, tragi-comic epic worthy of its own praise dictionary. From a bizarre story of the thirty-something's marital and spiritual crisis, Murakami's novel kaleidoscopes out into an exploration of post...
...different ways, each of the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki--devoted himself to commemorating aspects of an older, purer Japan they all felt would wither after their country's defeat in World War II. That left their postwar successors, most notably Haruki Murakami, to record the ghosts and vacant lots of a land whose spirit seemed to have vanished, leaving a soulless, synthetic wasteland of Dunkin' Donuts parlors, automated fashion victims and cinder-block abortion clinics...
...military honor all treaties and cease violations and evasions of last year's Europe-wide agreement on troop and conventional-arms rollbacks. Japanese opinion makers, meanwhile, were hoping to extend the arms- reduction process to Asia by sweetening Tokyo's aid offers to Moscow. Said University of Tokyo professor Haruki Wada: "I think there is a feeling among our people now that perestroika is of the first importance...
Wind and Whirlwind. Much of the evening resembles a lecture interspersed with picture slides. On cue, a cavalcade of people troop across the stage; samurai and sailors, fishermen and merchants, ladies of pleasure and constant wives, a wax puppet of an emperor and a Perry (Haruki Fujimoto) who stomps out a "lion dance" with his long white mane flailing the air. Pacific Overtures swallows them all like...