I liked this book and in particular really like thailand as I see others did too, and after that I also really liked landscape with flatiron, and generally liked all of the first four stories. I thought the weakest was honey pie, and though I think I understand what he was trying to do with super-frog saves tokyo, I didn't particularly care for it.
ufo in kushiro - This was the first Murakami writing I've read, so I wasn't expecting the abrupt, vague ending. I liked the story though, the atmosphere, and the mysterious elements of it (that were never explained). I'd even say that this was the most unresolved of all the stories as so much was left unclear. Since the title is all lower-case, one funny tidbit is that I thought that the story was going to be about someone named "Ufo" in Kushiro.
landscape with flatiron - I found the "roommate" Keisuke's dialogue a little much - it felt like the cursing and "cool" language were a little forced (though that easily could be the translator's fault) - but I really enjoyed this story and its melancholy. I really enjoyed the short Jack London "To Build a Fire" digression about Junko's against-the-grain assertion that the character wanted death - "Otherwise, how could the ending of the story be so quiet and beautiful?"
all god's children can dance - While I was expecting an unclear ending by this point, I still found it frustrating not to find out who the man was he was following, or where the man had disappeared to, though I liked the story.
thailand - The strongest story of the collection. I highlighted a few places in the story, but I'll share one of my favourites from the end of the story:
Quote:
“He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn't take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them."
"How very strange," Satsuki said.
"Yes," Nimit said, "it is strange." His face was grave. "I remember asking my employer, 'Then what do polar bears exist for?' ' Yes, exactly,' he said with a big smile. 'Then what do we exist for, Nimit?'"
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super-frog saves tokyo - Reading this thread, I have a different take on it than some of you. I found the story very ordinary, and along with Honey Pie, thought it was one of the only two stories in the collection that wasn't purposefully vague and unresolved. I see it as the frog and everything strange about the story being completely in Katagiri's mind, and that his mind had broken and invented this alternate reality because of the stress of the Kobe earthquake and helplessness to do anything about it, and his overwhelming feeling of unimportance in his day-to-day life. So his mind created a crazy scenario where he is needed to save Tokyo. I do wonder though if this story is meant to allude to the Tokyo gas attacks which happened a very short time later. I liked his quote from the story:
Quote:
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"The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats. Each and every one of us is a being of limited duration: all of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose."
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honey pie - The most conventional of all the stories, and really the only one with a sort-of solid sort-of happy ending. I'm not sure if I found it self-indulgent or not, but the allusion to Murakami himself seems too strong for my taste. It felt a bit like he decided that after all the vagueness and sadness of the preceding stories, he needed a more optimistic finale. But whatever his reasons, the story just didn't resonate as much with me.
Besides the obvious one of each character being tangentially affected by the Kobe earthquake, as others have mentioned these stories all seem connected by loneliness and melancholy. These are all people missing something from life and all seeming a bit empty. And as has been said, they're all dealing with their own personal little earthquakes.
I noticed a theme of bears throughout the collection. It's most obvious in the bookend stories - the story about bears in ufo in kushiro and the, well, story about bears in honey pie - but also the polar bear musing in thailand and the company the frog takes care of in super-frog saves tokyo being named "Big Bear Trading".
I found it ironic that in honey pie, Murakami mentions that the writer Junpei released a short story collection where one of the stories had been turned into a movie, and in real life years later one of these short stories (all god's children can dance) was turned into a movie, so it's another ironic mirroring of Murakami to the story that he couldn't have even predicted (although, since I'm not very familiar with Murakami, it's possible the same situation could've already happened with one of his earlier short story collections and he was purposely mirroring himself).
It's been interesting reading everyone's thoughts on this collection.