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A literal and literate Frog comes to Katagiri with a request, and what seems like a Tolkienesque hero’s journey becomes more metaphysical, with questions about reality, the purpose of saving Tokyo and discovery of the un-me inside the me, whether Frog or human. How would Katagiri know quotes from Russian novels and German philosophy without going through the source of collective unconscious in order to defeat Worm?

I can’t recall the Beatles ever recording a song named “Thailand” but here we have it, another short story by Murakami, and this one takes an opposite tack from most of his that I’ve read so far. In this case, a doctor on vacation meets a helpful driver and finds the small stone inside of her. Or rather hears about it and has yet to find it in her dream. The man who caused this pain already barely a presence.

Covering a civilization’s entire history in a play, even one of a three-part cycle, is a daunting task for anyone and I am in awe of the undertaking to make it Vyasa’s story without end. Many of the characters speak in absolutes, which is very human, but also have the unfortunate habit of acting and interacting with others based on these boasts, making their history one of impending horrors due to a game of dice.

A clever pantheistic account of a salary-earning everyman whose one-day journey encapsulates an entire bible’s worth of meaning: from his hungover genesis, issues concerning his immaculate birth and epiphanic revelation after a fruitless attempt to find his true father. Murakami is careful not to make any direct reference to The Bible, for Yoshiya’s mum is far from a Mary but nevertheless a prime-moving believer.

Just when I was starting to think all Murakami knew to write about was men reflecting on their sexual activity, he has this pyretic gem about Junko and the bonfire. Maybe it is all metaphors within metaphors, like a driftwood artist trapped inside a refrigerator, but her insight into the minds of other people slowly reveals itself like an elaborate dream that is more than simply fulfillment of a wish; fire goes free.

What may be a forerunner to Drive My Car, the movie, (and really the Kino parts of the screenplay) is a tale of a successful Tokyo-dweller who is unlucky in love and must go to Hokkaido to get closure. What Komura ends up getting after he delivers a mystery box is sex with sassy Shimao who reveals that his journey of self-discovery has just begun. Also, watch out for bears when doing it in the wild.

I was so impatient to post my pithy statement yesterday that I forgot to update the page number, thus allowing me a less poetic reflection on what all of Freud’s dreamwork means. It is impressive how he worked out a theory that transformed our world but what each of us has become over the past century may have a handle on the short end of the psychological shtick giving to “aery nothing” such scientistic names.

A long, loopy laneway to find the “royal road to the unconscious” with plenty of cul-de-sacs into specific dreams that chronicle Freud’s family trips and social circles. I must’ve missed the off-ramp to get to the good parts of the psyche, instead I got stuck on his flimsy arguments for fulfillment and him gaslighting us against “all dreams require a sexual interpretations” (p. 521) nudge nudge wink wink.

The final story in this collection reads a bit more of a puzzle, probably, than all the other stories combined. The man is a memory of himself while the woman, M, only exists as a half-remembered essence. Somehow Hemingway inspired these ruminations, but I couldn’t stop picturing the narrator as Bluto from the Popeye cartoons, ready to battle against all the sailors in the world to get back his first love.

An amusing inversion of the Kafkaian tale, with a creature suddenly having to navigate the world as a full-grown adult male, who just happens to the same Samsa that underwent his own metamorphosis. Not only simple actions of getting up, eating and finding clothes to wear get a detailed analysis, but also meeting with a locksmith apprentice makes clear how much time and love are human qualia most species live without.

With a title like Kino, being the main character’s only identifier, the story could have been about anything, and anything it is. Nevertheless, it is a cinematic story that starts off a bit like Midnight Diner and transformed into the emotional backstory of Drive My Car with a mystical, time-blending conclusion. Pay attention to a cat when things are good, watch out when the snakes start circling.

Finding a balance between cautiously optimistic and alert to the dangers that human beings impose on the planet, an eloquent Robinson along with a curiously voiceless Aronica encourage readers to embrace their Element, without being too specific about what it means for each individual. As much as I recognize the rhetoric for self empowerment, I still wonder if educators really want all of our true potential achieved.

Habara, much like Tanimura from the previous stories and Kafuku before him, is a bit of a cipher, a man without, and the titular Scheherazade provides the narrative thread during her scheduled drop-ins. She has the ability to live in previous lives, give a sense of the feel for her worlds of water or seventeen-year-old self. He keeps a record of her arousing stories yet worries that someone else might figure him out.

Tanimura returns, perhaps a preferred nom de plume for Murakami, to observe the successful love affairs of Dr. Tokai and the one that got away, literally stopping his heart. While this plastic surgeon seems to have had a life most men desire (beautiful women and no strings attached), he fall afoul of an independent organ that eludes their detection and it is up to Tanimura to give the dear doctor’s final diagnosis.

The New Palace continues to be a focal point of jealousy and frustration, despite Genji’s casual disregard for the friction he created between one quarter and the others. Very telling how what started out as a Wreath of Clouds escalated into a full-blown Typhoon. As if building to another devastating storm, the willful To no Chujo has become like the unbending oak about to break a few branches from the family tree.

While the title is an immediate tip-off to the Beatles masterpiece, the story itself has little to do with either Paul or John (only a brief exchange about writing styles) but everything to do with the haunting regret of this “wimpy” song. Tanimura is closed off for a narrator, Kitaru his open-for-anything opposite, and unlucky Erika caught in the middle like the day between two days ago and just before tomorrow.

The themes of death and longevity through the arts (or media as some scholars have it) are fitting for a celebration of Shakespeare’s death; Winter’s Tale has a special significance. Yet, in the six years since Our Time was published, the earnest pleas to end racial violence and civil strife have fallen on deaf ears, almost as if we westerners have learned nothing from any of these astute plays.

A spellbinding story of an actor whose glaucoma prevents him from driving the titular car, but allows him the insight to recognize the role he plays when not on stage, enabled by the brusque yet steady-handed Misaki. The relationship between the daughterless widower and fatherless orphan nicely fits with the Uncle Vanya and Sonya parts being rehearsed in the background, only a traces of Yelena and Astrov in his life.

Stories begin to pile up, one on top of the other, each expressing and expanding upon the idea that the Element is the place to be. And yet this idea starts to diffuse into a series of tales from successful people that occasionally encounter setbacks. When Sir Robinson relates his life-altering adversity and inspiring mentorship, a thin filament breaks apart and his bright bulb starts to dim for personal empowerment.

Starting out with hot-button topics such as gender and sexuality in Shakespeare plays, the contributors settle down to the more seductive scholarly work of teaching theatrical drama and editing textual variants. Even more impressive than each short-form essay relating coherent interpretations, shorter pieces show evidence of authors responding to each other, at least within their own section. Revolutionary academics!

A very brief denouement still achieves a synthesis in less than twenty pages of everything that came before. In some ways Benny ends up a bit like Marcus, the About a Boy boy who loses his quirky charm, and yet Benny has gained a self-consciousness from Aikon that lives beyond the here and now. Even if he, like Marcus, still has a lot of things to figure out, the Book subsists with its open-ended conclusion.

Benny and the Book take their fourth act break, letting the other characters take to the stage and start interacting with each other. Aikon and Kimi arrive in the United States and seem on a collision course with Annabelle and her messy home; even Cory and the Library hobos come together to lend hands with the Tidy Magic but the spell is suddenly broken as Benny wakes up and demands the Book change its plot.

The cluttered kitchen sink drama expands to include time and space in familiar yet surprising ways: the Book establishes its hold on Benny’s narrative, then reaches beyond the Ethernet to a Zen monastery in Japan. As for time, so much happens over the course of a few days, and then after a chaotic election results are in, the following four years spontaneously erupt into a riot in this Pacific Northwest metropolis.

The interwoven mélange of monologues ends much like it began, randomly with a hint of underlying menace. Coupland even goes so far as to point out “this isn’t an actual story” (p. 250) so I guess anything conclusive like a moral is not to be expected. Nevertheless, I won’t ever see another Thule cargo carrier passing by on the street without wondering what grim evidence might be lurking inside. Thanks a lot!

The parade of desperate and depraved denizens from the Lotus Land continues with drugs, sex, hoarding and carbeques becoming a running theme. Most interactions relate to wishing someone was dead, actually plotting another’s demise, or being bummed that someone else had died. Like the narrator of Rubbermaid Tubs feels, society shot past our best before date but it’s not too late to book a one-way trip to Auckland.

Erudite educator Sir Robinson adapts his prized lectures usually found on TEDtalks and RSA Animates to be assessable to his reading audience with the Element, a way of being based on numerous interviews with artists, athletes, even academics. Their stories are inspiring and offer a counterpoint to the many ways that traditional schooling radically veers away from letting students find each own vital element.

The voices in his head may just have been a way to get him to The Library and mixed up in the lives of The Aleph and B-man, for better of worse. While this literary wandering happen, Annabelle starts to take hold of her impulsive life, gets in touch with herself and starts tidying her hovel, inspired by a Zen monk who might be her dead husband’s aunt? And Kenji is almost ready for a final journey through the sewer.

Still vague on the location for many of these stories even as it becomes increasingly clear that each one of them will be connected in that six-degrees-of-separation sort of way. At least a couple stories hone in on the Pacific Northwest and close enough to the author’s West Vancouver habitat, a suburb to the city known for usually playing the part of somewhere generically American in the movies and Netflix series.

Those little telltale mentions of Covid-19 reveal the hidden design of what was supposed to be a pre-pandemic novel that had to shift, out of necessity, into isolated stories while connecting back to the Internet famous Dad Dancer storyline. Do we need this many reminders of how self-serving and nasty people can be toward each other, when the past two years brought out the worst in most seemingly civilized societies?

Benny and the Book quickly establish a dialogue that will most likely develop throughout the novel with a few other voices joining them. The boy starts learning about the bicameral auditory hallucinations, and the Book elaborates on the Zen relationship between Made and Unmade things. Annabelle swings from struggling over her husband’s death to supporting her son. One constant is all that stuff cluttering her life.