More hit than miss, but not many bullseyes either. Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories is a must for fans of the Japanese author (myself included), but probably not a good starting point for anyone wanting to learn why he seems to have attracted a legion of dedicated followers. The usual ingredients of Murakami's novels are all here, but in too brief a form to be anywhere near as captivating. ( )

Mijn recensie; http://www.pinkbullets.nl/2008/06/boo... ( )

All over the scale in terms of moods and themes, the quality often suffers. ( )

Haruki Murakami’s strength is the novel. It allows him the chance to truly dig into his strange subjects. Yet, saying his novels are better than his short stories is somewhat like saying that 10 million dollars is better than 9 million dollars. The difference isn’t worth worrying about.

In this collection of short stories, Murakami continues to use strange and slightly disturbing situations to explore what makes his antagonists tick. In doing so, we are lucky to join on the journey. There are few misses in this collection. And the hits are grand and memorable.

I have said it before and I will say it again. I approach every new Murakami book with the fear that I will be disappointed. I am never disappointed, I am always enthralled, and I am always thrilled to have discovered Murakami in the first place. Each new reading is like having that first discovery all over again. ( )

While reading this, I found myself comparing it to Ian McEwan's short stories. Such a brilliant mix of the ordinary and the surreal.

My favorite stories were The Kangaroo Communiqué, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, The Dancing Dwarf, and The Silence. The latter two both made me squee while reading and gave me that feeling of "omg I wish I could write something this perfectly brilliant".

The Dancing Dwarf was just so much awesome awesomeness. It starts off with a dream, and you're told it's a dream, so all the weird things, you think they're just dream-weird. After all, it mentions records and lots of names of famous singers and bands like The Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra. So you can dismiss all the other stuff as just a dream. The setup is perfect. And then he wakes up and goes to work at the elephant factory.

Yeah, elephant factory. And then little by little you realise that all the weird things in his dream weren't dream-weird at all; they're perfectly normal for this world. The rest of the story is very fairytale-like with the way the dwarf offers him a deal and then it all goes wrong. If it hadn't started out the way it did, I would have still thought it was an awesome story, one of my favorites in the book, but I wouldn't have been so blown away as I was. It just added a whole extra layer of awesomeness.

The whole elephant factory thing was incredibly cool, too. Both the idea of it and how this bizarre thing was just ordinary work to the protagonist.

The Silence was cool in a different way. It was a perfectly average story taking place in our world, and that's what I loved so much about it. It was just a guy telling this other guy about an incident when he was at school. So ordinary, but just so well-written and wonderful and brilliant. I loved it. ( )