The world outside has become hostile, bitterly cold, semi-buried in ash, inhabited by slimy snakes and faceless people. He is abashed and cannot recall the woman or his actions. She accuses him of a serious, but unnamed, offence against this friend. The narrator meets a woman in a bar, with whom, it transpires, he shares a mutual female friend. The last story is the most taut and unsettling. The narrator goes on to express surprise that an “ugly” woman can be pleasant, interesting and good company. “Carnaval” takes a superficially reflective turn in this mode, commencing with several pages of facile maundering on ugliness and beauty in women: she was “the ugliest woman I ever met”, but maybe that’s what made her “unique” beautiful women are “constantly tormented” by their “flaws”. When the situation repeats of the older man, looking back at his youth, surprised by ageing, and having learned very little (an acute enough observation), the reader, too, learns very little, and might begin to conclude that these are tales of the slightly remarkable, which one would not be tempted to read more than once.
In “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection”, it is hard not to read “It’s true that life brings us far more defeats than victories” as merely trite. The conversational style can be slack and cliched, speckled with reflections on philosophical questions about ageing, identity, memory and what it is to know oneself. The playfulness with the identity of the narrator might be more rewarding, were it not for the stretches of tepid, underpowered writing. Even so, the women in this book are remarkably less complex, less individual, than the men, existing primarily as a pretext for the male characters to find out, or fail to find out, about themselves. Murakami, by his own account, is less interested in creating complex characters than in the interaction his characters have with the world in which he imagines them. Only one narrator is given a name: “Haruki Murakami”. E ight stories are told in the first person, with each narrator a man in late middle age who shares interests, such as jazz and baseball, with his author.
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