Nothing but the Start

After the Quake
by Haruki Murakami
Rating: four out of five stars

Prior to this book, I’d only ever read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle –which is, as I’ve mentioned before, a strange, strange book that mixes mystery, relationships, WWII, mysticism … basically the kitchen sink and a bunch of cats. So, I knew that there is something to love about Murakami. His short stories are a treat, because for the most part, they keep to one story line and allow you to appreciate his sparse writing style. A master story-teller, Murakami is inventive. I particularly enjoyed “Landscape with Flat Iron” followed by “Honey Pie” and “All God’s Children Can Dance.”

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An Unquiet  Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
by Kay Redfield Jamison
Rating: three out of five stars

An Unquiet Mind is an inside look at manic depressive disorder – how difficult it is, even for a doctor  to recognize in herself, acknowledge, treat, and live with it. I found the book a lot less sensational than I anticipated, and for this I am grateful. Not only is it a brave work of someone going through something I cannot quite understand, but it also provides an historical perspective of the illness and its treatments. This book is brave on both a personal and professional level, as Jamison risked her professional career to be so honest about an illness that comes with so much stigma and misunderstanding.

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The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Rating: three out of five stars

This is a re-read, of course, and a reliable one. These stories are simple but still enjoyable. It’s nice to read a short story with a straight-forward (for the most part) moral and lesson. More current short stories are often so complicated that, as a reader, I cannot remember what took place or what point the author was trying to make, just a few weeks after I close the book covers. But these stories stick with me. Yes, they are dated, but still thoughtful.

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All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Cormac McCarthy
Rating: four out of five stars

This book did it for me. McCarthy is a master. He uses spare language – he doesn’t spoon feed readers the story. Rather, the reader is expected to make connections, to make themselves comfortable with the fact that they don’t know all the information upfront and that they will learn more by…wait for it…reading. All the Pretty Horses has everything I want in a book: love, courage, heartbreak, redemption, injustice, and sentences that can stand alone as poems – oh yes, and horses. I’ve ordered the other two books of this border trilogy.

I don’t go to many plays.  I’ve mentioned my wish that this weren’t so, along with my concern that it is a dying art form, particularly in my fair city.  That was a tad sensationalist.  So, it was with great anticipation that I went to see Company One’s Boston theater premier of Haruki Murakami’s short story collection After the Quake – as adapted by Frank Galati.

Prior to this week, I’d only ever read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle – a strange, strange book that mixes mystery, relationships, WWII, mysticism … you name it.  It meanders around a storyline (or a dozen storylines) and you lose your place and then can’t seem to forget it.

So, a play adaptation of Murakami – with his constant interweaving of reality and its counterparts – sounded interesting.  BCA Plaza Theatre is a nice little place in the South End with about 140 seats.  (Right next door you can get really delicious fries and drinks at the Beehive.)  The play mixed two stories from the After the Quake collection: “Honey Pie” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.”  One a little more grounded in reality than the other, so I thought they were a good combination.

Murakami wrote this collection of short stories after the earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan in 1995.  The “Kobe Earthquake” was at a 6.9 magnitude and killed approximately 5,500 and injured 36,896 people.  In writing the stories, Murakami set some guidelines: All had to be related to the earthquake but none could take place in Kobe or during the actual event.  They also had to be written in the third person.  Now, this last bit clears up something about the play.  Yes, there was a narrator for both stories, but every once in a while the characters themselves would deliver a self- descriptive monologue in the third person.  It felt odd, but it was Galati sticking within Murakami’s guidelines.

The two musicians on stage throughout the 90 minutes were fantastic.  A violin and a bass clarinet.  Five actors total (including a little girl), switched characters as the play jumped between stories, including the role of narrator.  The set was spare and seemed to catch an appropriate Murakami mood.  The actors were decent, but I was distracted by some of the delivery.

Not the most amazing thing I’ve experienced, but I’m glad I went.  Theater helps you look at a storyline from a different view.  For example, when reading “Honey Pie” I did not pay much attention to the story of the bears and consider what that story within meant to the overall story.  But the play got me thinking…

“I’ll have grounds/ More relative than this – the play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”

I would recommend this play for lovers of the novelist – or rather, I’d recommend reading the short stories and then going to the play, because it is impossible not to appreciate Murakami.