All of the stories in this collection are good: Murakami is a pro, and he remains the best there is (though Paul Auster is a contender) at seamlessly blending the mundane and the uncanny. The stories I like the best are the ones that seem—I stress: seem—to owe the most to the simple one-thing-after-another of the world, and I am generally least pleased by the ones most purely fanciful, though I did enjoy the very fanciful "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" quite a bit.
I first read Pinball, 1973 in, it must have been, about 1990. (I have a vivid memory, probably false, of reading it on sunny day in an apartment in Higashi Murayama City.) I didn't hate it, but it didn't make me a die-hard Murakami fan either. Somehow, however, over the years, in my memory, the book got worse and worse. That, coupled with the fact that the book's author doesn't seem to think very highly of it either—Murakami refuses to authorize a new English translation—convinced me that it was a real piece of crap. It's not, actually. It's an entertaining light read, though of course it's not a wart on Wind-up Bird's ass, I'm looking forward to the day when, having worked my way through the years, I get back to that, Murakami's masterpiece,
Everyone's heard the criticisms of Murakami: he writes the same character over and over, the same book; his prose, as Geoff Dyer has recently noted can be (at least in translation) "pretty poor." And yet . . . I don't think that's the whole story. Even if it is part of the story, one still needs to explain why he is so popular, and popular with a lot of very discerning readers. Thus I have set myself to read through as much of his oeuvre as I can get my hands on (in English). The Elephant Vanishes is a piece of that quest, and, like all but the very finest collections of short stories, it seems to me a mixed bag: some of the stories are superb, others not so much. That's probably a fancy way of saying, of course, that I like some of the stories better than I like others. In fact, I've noticed, reading this collection and remembering the earlier Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, that it's stories such as "Chance Traveler" in the earlier book, and "A Slow Boat to China" in this one, in which Murakami lays a few fragments of story on the table and allows us to make of them what we will, which, to me, are the most appealing. I also notice that, though no one moves more effortlessly between the mundane and the fantastic, it is in those stories that have a firm grounding in the mundane—spaghetti making and so on—where the fantastic is used to best effect. The stories that are more purely fantastic such as "The Dancing Dwarf" seem to me less successful. Since I'm trying to move through Murakami's stuff in more or less chronological order, and since I finished Hear the Wind Sing not long ago, perhaps I'll move on to Pinball, 1973 next. (And is it just me, or does Alfred Birnbaum render Murakami's prose into much crisper, livelier English than Jay Rubin?)
The enterprising Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly have committed themselves to bringing out the complete work of manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi. As a result of their commitment we now have Good-Bye, volume three of their edition of Tatsumi's work, which collects work Tatsumi pubished in the early 1970s. Hiroshima, Yasukuni, and the "pan-pan girls" of the Occupation years all make prominent appearances, and make many of the comics collected more explicitly political than those assembled in the first two volumes (though Tatsumi's considerations of the miseries of the working class, featured in those earlier volumes, are certainly implicitly political). Tatsumi's vision continues to be as bleak as we've come to expect, and the rigor with which he writes and draws his accomplished short stories is unchanged. Tatsumi's work, even work decades old, is a welcome change form the airy-fairy fantasy which threatens to dominate, at the expense of this sort of gritty realism, the world of manga.