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Herbert Mitgang - From Japan, Big Macs and Marlboros in Stories
Herbert
Mitgang
From
Japan, Big Macs and Marlboros in Stories
May 12 1993, The New York Times
Book Review
The Elephant Vanishes By Haruki
Murakami Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. 327 pages. Alfred A.
Knopf.
Haruki Murakami's
frequent-flyer fiction crosses the Pacific from Japan effortlessly and makes a
soft landing in the United States for the American reader. But I wish the
characters in The Elephant Vanishes, his new book of short stories,
wouldn't spend so much time at McDonald's, lighting up Marlboros, listening to
Bruce Springsteen records and watching Woody Allen movies as a prelude to
romance. Just when you're ready for some wisdom from the Orient, the author
serves up a Big Mac.
No question that Mr.
Murakami is the most international voice among the current generation of
Japanese novelists. He demonstrated that in A Wild Sheep Chase, an
imaginative novel in which modern and traditional forces clashed symbolically,
as well as in the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the
World.
Undeniably, he is on the
mark about the influence of copycat culture and franchises in Japan, but that's
a familiar story by now. Perhaps in vain, he makes a reader yearn for literary
insights without so many American icons and brand names.
The stories, lucidly
translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin, display the author's (all right,
his characters') wide range of reading and interests. Most are set in Tokyo and
its environs, but they include references to Allen Ginsberg, Clarence Darrow,
Candice Bergen, the "Colonel Bogey" March, Penthouse magazine, Adidas T-shirts,
Meryl Streep, Remy Martin cognac, I. W. Harper, Robert De Niro, Anna
Karenina, Sly and the Family Stone, Dustin Hoffman, the film Jaws,
Willie Nelson, Silly Putty, Julio Iglesias, Baskin-Robbins ice cream and
Katherine Mansfield. (How many American novelists have read her
lately?)
There are 17 charming,
humorous and frequently puzzling short stories in The Elephant Vanishes,
some of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Nearly all bear the
author's special imprint: a mixture of magical realism, feckless wandering and
stylish writing, often ending at a blank wall. In one tale, the first-person
narrator is reading Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez and finds the writing opaque, to
which the reader is inclined to respond, Look who's talking.
In the title story, Mr.
Murakami succeeds in creating one of his typical phlegmatic characters: a public
relations junior executive for a manufacturer of electrical appliances who
doesn't particularly care what he's doing for a living, contrary to the
conventional wisdom that all workers in Japan cheer for the company team. The
narrator says, "My job was to negotiate with several women's magazines for
tie-in articles -- not the kind of work that takes a great deal of intelligence,
but I had to see to it that the articles they wrote didn't smack of advertising.
When magazines gave us publicity, we rewarded them by placing ads in their
pages. They scratched our backs, we scratched theirs." To be sure, the wised-up
author slyly hints, this isn't New York, it's Tokyo.
But what about the
vanishing elephant? And what about the vanishing girlfriend the narrator meets
on the job? Yes, an old elephant does disappear, together with his old keeper,
from a Tokyo suburb, and yes, the narrator wants to connect with a new
girlfriend, but language pulls them apart. She seems to count his words too
carefully. Out of a minor incident, Mr. Murakami somehow manages to put the
pieces in the magical puzzle together yet without arriving at a solution. Along
the way, he quietly slips in observations about developers, pompous town
officials, inept law-enforcement officers and the overkill methods of the
state.
Mr. Murakami lets his
imagination run wild in The Second Bakery Attack, in which a husband and
wife hold up a McDonald's and steal 30 hamburgers, grilled for takeout, although
the manager offers them money instead. In TV People, little men from
somewhere out there invade a household, bring in their own television set, push
aside the books and magazines and silently take over the living room and maybe
the imagination. In Barn Burning, the narrator loses his flaky girlfriend
to a cool gent with a fancy car whose hobby -- or is it his source of easy
money? -- is burning barns.
Mr. Murakami's humor
shines through his writing. In Lederhosen, the most offbeat tale in the
collection, the author shows how a minor event can be built up into a story
that, if it didn't happen, should have. A pair of those Alpine shorts leads to
the divorce of a long-married Japanese couple. In a kind gesture, the wife goes
to a special lederhosen store outside Hamburg to buy her husband a pair. He
isn't there to try them on for a snug fit, as the proud shopkeepers insist, so
she drags a man in off the streets who has the same build as her husband. Seeing
the stranger's bare skin, legs and belly as he prances in the shorts, she
suddenly realizes she's hated her husband all through their years together and
files for divorce.
Generally, Mr. Murakami
keeps his writing simple and straightforward, but every now and then he offers a
stunning image. After one of his characters finishes a six-pack of beer, "Six
pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid." Later, "I took the six
pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of a
bracelet." Far less original are some of his frequent references to American
films: "A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in
The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger
pangs."
Nearly all the short
stories in The Elephant Vanishes are fun to read, but Mr. Murakami seems
better as a long-distance runner in fiction. Allegorically, it would also help
if he substituted some sushi for all those Big Macs.
Herbert Mitgang - From Japan, Big Macs and Marlboros in Stories
Herbert
Mitgang
From
Japan, Big Macs and Marlboros in Stories
May 12 1993, The New York Times
Book Review
The Elephant Vanishes By Haruki
Murakami Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. 327 pages. Alfred A.
Knopf.
Haruki Murakami's
frequent-flyer fiction crosses the Pacific from Japan effortlessly and makes a
soft landing in the United States for the American reader. But I wish the
characters in The Elephant Vanishes, his new book of short stories,
wouldn't spend so much time at McDonald's, lighting up Marlboros, listening to
Bruce Springsteen records and watching Woody Allen movies as a prelude to
romance. Just when you're ready for some wisdom from the Orient, the author
serves up a Big Mac.
No question that Mr.
Murakami is the most international voice among the current generation of
Japanese novelists. He demonstrated that in A Wild Sheep Chase, an
imaginative novel in which modern and traditional forces clashed symbolically,
as well as in the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the
World.
Undeniably, he is on the
mark about the influence of copycat culture and franchises in Japan, but that's
a familiar story by now. Perhaps in vain, he makes a reader yearn for literary
insights without so many American icons and brand names.
The stories, lucidly
translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin, display the author's (all right,
his characters') wide range of reading and interests. Most are set in Tokyo and
its environs, but they include references to Allen Ginsberg, Clarence Darrow,
Candice Bergen, the "Colonel Bogey" March, Penthouse magazine, Adidas T-shirts,
Meryl Streep, Remy Martin cognac, I. W. Harper, Robert De Niro, Anna
Karenina, Sly and the Family Stone, Dustin Hoffman, the film Jaws,
Willie Nelson, Silly Putty, Julio Iglesias, Baskin-Robbins ice cream and
Katherine Mansfield. (How many American novelists have read her
lately?)
There are 17 charming,
humorous and frequently puzzling short stories in The Elephant Vanishes,
some of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Nearly all bear the
author's special imprint: a mixture of magical realism, feckless wandering and
stylish writing, often ending at a blank wall. In one tale, the first-person
narrator is reading Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez and finds the writing opaque, to
which the reader is inclined to respond, Look who's talking.
In the title story, Mr.
Murakami succeeds in creating one of his typical phlegmatic characters: a public
relations junior executive for a manufacturer of electrical appliances who
doesn't particularly care what he's doing for a living, contrary to the
conventional wisdom that all workers in Japan cheer for the company team. The
narrator says, "My job was to negotiate with several women's magazines for
tie-in articles -- not the kind of work that takes a great deal of intelligence,
but I had to see to it that the articles they wrote didn't smack of advertising.
When magazines gave us publicity, we rewarded them by placing ads in their
pages. They scratched our backs, we scratched theirs." To be sure, the wised-up
author slyly hints, this isn't New York, it's Tokyo.
But what about the
vanishing elephant? And what about the vanishing girlfriend the narrator meets
on the job? Yes, an old elephant does disappear, together with his old keeper,
from a Tokyo suburb, and yes, the narrator wants to connect with a new
girlfriend, but language pulls them apart. She seems to count his words too
carefully. Out of a minor incident, Mr. Murakami somehow manages to put the
pieces in the magical puzzle together yet without arriving at a solution. Along
the way, he quietly slips in observations about developers, pompous town
officials, inept law-enforcement officers and the overkill methods of the
state.
Mr. Murakami lets his
imagination run wild in The Second Bakery Attack, in which a husband and
wife hold up a McDonald's and steal 30 hamburgers, grilled for takeout, although
the manager offers them money instead. In TV People, little men from
somewhere out there invade a household, bring in their own television set, push
aside the books and magazines and silently take over the living room and maybe
the imagination. In Barn Burning, the narrator loses his flaky girlfriend
to a cool gent with a fancy car whose hobby -- or is it his source of easy
money? -- is burning barns.
Mr. Murakami's humor
shines through his writing. In Lederhosen, the most offbeat tale in the
collection, the author shows how a minor event can be built up into a story
that, if it didn't happen, should have. A pair of those Alpine shorts leads to
the divorce of a long-married Japanese couple. In a kind gesture, the wife goes
to a special lederhosen store outside Hamburg to buy her husband a pair. He
isn't there to try them on for a snug fit, as the proud shopkeepers insist, so
she drags a man in off the streets who has the same build as her husband. Seeing
the stranger's bare skin, legs and belly as he prances in the shorts, she
suddenly realizes she's hated her husband all through their years together and
files for divorce.
Generally, Mr. Murakami
keeps his writing simple and straightforward, but every now and then he offers a
stunning image. After one of his characters finishes a six-pack of beer, "Six
pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid." Later, "I took the six
pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of a
bracelet." Far less original are some of his frequent references to American
films: "A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in
The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger
pangs."
Nearly all the short
stories in The Elephant Vanishes are fun to read, but Mr. Murakami seems
better as a long-distance runner in fiction. Allegorically, it would also help
if he substituted some sushi for all those Big Macs.
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