Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
a meander through a magical world, 8 Feb 2006
A writer that expresses perfectly the isolation and loneliness of the modern world, Murakami's short stories are like peering through a dozen windows into a world where fantasy and reality mix, seperate and blend together again. His talent lies in the ability to take the mundane and make it fantastic, offering us a peek into ordinary lives sprinkled with the kind of surreal conversations and events that make you look around you whilst in the street or on the bus and wonder what all these people around you are really like.
I can't read any of his work without seeing the world differently afterwards, and this collection i could read over and over. Impossible to pigeon hole, each story has it's own distinct mood, but in each the atmosphere persists; that the world has a beauty that, if we just scratch the surface off the everyday, will be revealed.
If you're new to Murakami, start here or with The Elephant Vanishes, if you're familiar with his writing you will need no persuasion.
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15 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
disappointing, 19 Aug 2006
I wonder if these stories would ever have been published if Murakami was not already a famous writer. I've read all of his books translated into English and this is really pretty mediocre compared with most of his other work. One or two stories are vintage Murakami but the majority reads like very average school essays. I don't think I would have bothered reading any of his other books if this was the first one I read - which would have been my loss as he has written some marvelous novels, my favourite still being "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle".
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8 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Collected B-sides, 31 Jan 2007
These stories are, in the main, gossamer thin. 'Mirror' is, I think , one of the most feeble published stories I have read by ANYONE. Some of the others are OK but one more cryptic story about a late twenties, beer-drinking, jazz-loving guy and I might have flung the book from me instead of putting it down gently. Riffing on bizarre coincidences and strange newspaper reports does not great stories make.
Hard Boiled Wonderland and Wind Up Bird are fantastic books; this is just the latest, and worst, in a series of partial failures from Murakami. Maybe, like bands, authors have their day, and Murakami at 57 simply has nothing new to say.
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