Review: Lederhosen by Haruki Murakami

Lederhosen by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story is available online at https://granta.com/lederhosen and in Murakami's short story collection The Elephant Vanishes

A man's wife's friend turns up very early for dinner, as conversation begins to run out she tells him the story of how her parents divorce was "all because of a pair of shorts" or more correctly lederhosen. Her mother had gone to visit family in Germany. She'd never travelled alone in all her 55 years of life. According to the friend, her father was a hard worker, and although her parents never argued, there had been rows over him and other woman. Her father asks her mother to bring back a souvenir, a pair of lederhosen for him, she agrees to do this ****SPOILER ALERT*** but he never gets his lederhosen.

Lederhosen are often viewed as comical apparal outside of their cultural context, layer this on top of that the vision of a Japanese man wearing them and you get the picture. Murakami's writing often contains a moment of epiphany. Unable to buy lederhosen because the store will not sell them without the wearer being present to ensure correct fit and maintain the stores proud reputation, the mother finds a stranger as a standin. Watching this ludicrous lederhosen clad man provides that pivotal moment in the mother's life allowing her to reflect upon her marriage and her feelings for her husband.

ashramblings verdict 3* Why she tells this story we never know. Are there any parallels between the daughter, the friend's husband and his absent wife and the daughter, her father and absent mother? This is a story about how a novel experience has a profund effect on the mother who never returns home to her husband and daughter, but leaves us wondering exactly how profund an effect this also had on the daughter who never married and fill her time teaching electric organ and playing tennis, skiing and swimming.

View all my reviews

Review: The Seventh Man by Haruki Murakami

The Seventh Man by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this as per the translation available in Granta Magazine. It s also available as pdf on GoodReads

The setting is some sort of therapy session perhaps one where "survivors" tell their stories. The seventh man of the title tells his story within this minimal framing. He recounts a childood experience, the loss of his best friend K, and his own survival, during a typhoon and tsunami when he was 10 years old. Plagued for the rest of his life by nightmares which impacted all his life, driving him away from his childhood home, stopping him from marrying, and by the fear that he had not done enough to save his friend, the old man tells how after going through a bundle of his friends artwork from their childhood he finally returned to the beach where his friend was lost and put paid to the fear which he had lived his life, attained a kind of salvation, a recovery. His final statement to the therapy group is

'They tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself; but I don't beieve that, he said. Then, a moment later, he added: 'Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightenng thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that soemthing was the wave' "

The story has some beautiful desciptions the typhoon weather and its tsunami - "the rain began to beat against the house with a weird dry sound, like handfuls of sand", "the storm's great 'eye' seemed to be up there, fixing its cold stare on all of us below", "the waves that had approached me were as unthreatening as waves can be - a gentle washing of the sandy beach. But something ominous about them - something like the touch of a reptile's skin - had sent a chill down my spine.....the waves were alive" "deep rumbling sound", the "weird gurgling" and "in the tip of the wave....floated K's body.....looking straight at me, smiling. HIs cold frozen eyes were locked on mine... his right arm was stretch out in my direction, as if he were trying to grab me...."

I think this is perhaps one of the more accessible of Murakami's stories; a good starter for readers unfamiliar with his work. It is also to be found in his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

View all my reviews

Checking out loneliness and loss – The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

Translated by Ted Goossen

In the Library basement, the narrator knocks on a door, “It was a normal, everyday knock, yet it sounded like someone had whacked the gates of hell with a baseball bat”. I wonder how many of us fervent readers can relate to that imagery of the depths of library deep in the stacks, down in the dungeons, alone, first time in that part of the library, in the dark and silence, facing our fears?

So the unnamed young narrator finds himself in a Kafkaesque underground world, jailed in a cell within a labyrinthine maze of corridors below basement, his food served by a beautiful, dumb, girl who speaks with her hands and floats in and out of his cell, and his sheep-man jailor, both of whom serve the custodian, an old man, in charge who has confined the youngster there until he has memorised all 3 books about Taxes in the Ottoman Empire, the subject which brought him to the library in the first place. If he is unable to memorise all the books within one month, his brains will be sucked out and eaten by the old man.

This is a mesmeric tale, almost like a fairy story but creepier with the usual off-the-wall Murakami surrealism – a typical Murakami exploration of loss. The youngster looses his new shoes, his pet starling and eventually his beloved mother to be left alone in the world, unsleeping at 2 o’clock in the morning and thinking again about the basement and its darkness.

Physically the book’s cover has an old –fashioned library ticket pocket stuck to its cover. The short story/novella’s text is augmented with drawings and graphics, imaginary and such as one would expect to find in an old reference tome. There was an article in Independent about book design which mentions this book.

ashramblings verdict 4* – probably one of the more accessible Murakami stories, and it is a short read. I can’t explain Murakami nor why there transcendence beyond reality works, but am a huge fan and I loved this one!