I consider them quite a random bunch of stories that happened to be written after a natural disaster which briefly appears in the pages. Bellissima l'immagine profondamente carveriana dell'immobilismo di fronte al televisore - i drammi esterni diventano palpabili quando la vita privata cessa negli stimoli, verità amarissima - e tutto sommato buoni gli intenti, ma il mordente si perde con una storia che sta in piedi con le stampelle e spegne la poca tensione narrativa con alcuni picchi di kitsch non indifferente. Her husband, Komura, locates an analogy for his wife’s disappearance in the story of a UFO sighting that causes a woman to leave home. I love his indignation when he imagines someone denying that he is a frog: “ Anyone claiming I am not a frog would be a dirty liar. There is something written on the stone, but she cannot read it because it is in Japanese: small black characters of some kind.

Recitava Agostino d'Ippona che "vivere nel rancore è l'equivalente di bere un veleno e sperare che sia l'altro a morire". Not unsimilar to the interviews with several members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult (that was responsible for the gas attack) in ‘Underground’, we are shown the emptiness, darkness and existential despair that Murakami’s characters experience in their lives. Ushers the reader into a hallucinatory world where where dreams and real-life nightmares are impossible to tell apart. An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package--and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. I had so much enjoyed 1Q84 that I threww myself in this short story Murakami book with great pleasure.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. I also like one part of 'Landscape with Flatiron' where Miyake said " Tell you the truth, I don't have a refrigerator. To prove his loyalty to Katagiri, Frog resolves a bank case for him; after this, Katagiri agrees to help Frog. I'm forever waiting to be disappointed by one of his books--I mean, the guy can't be PERFECT, can he? All of the stories are set in February 1995, the month between the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attacks.

Well told, well thought out and frankly a narrative I would have love to see more of, but still felt finished unlike the first story. In the penultimate story, “super-frog saves tokyo,” a six-foot tall frog enlists help from a collection agent named Katagiri. Each of the stories touches on the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, although only gently- none of the stories are based there and none of them feature the earthquake as a main part of the tale. And what makes this story so great is how uncertain everything felt; it felt real and unreal at the same time: it felt like reality had been warped and that the narrator may or may not have lost his mind. They are memorable dodges of plot, leaning into the hyperbanal: cooking, answering the home phone, traveling for work, and always with music as the backdrop.In 2022, the former prime minister of Japan Shinzo Abe was murdered by a man obsessed with Abe’s connection to a cultish church. It's a complicated story, much more so than any way I could explain it, and I will never be able to get across how well done it was. It is no great leap to hear that desire of the author’s reflected in the coda to the final story, “honey pie. The opening story deals with an unhappily divorced man who goes on an enforced holiday only to develop sexual problems due to a mysterious wooden cube in his airplane luggage.