PositiveThe Hindu (IND)Murakami continues to delight his fans with breezy tales that are snapshots of life. Murakami uses magical elements in his fiction, but unlike, say, Márquez or Rushdie, doesn’t employ them as fictional technique. They come as a part of human life that is experienced as confusing, illogical and mysterious even as it appears to be plain, orderly and sensible ... In between, he inserts little homilies about life ... Such epigrams, offered for the reader’s benefit, abound ... Two of the stories stand apart in evoking the unusual while imparting dollops of wisdom. In the very first story, ‘Cream’...[and] ‘Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey’ ... As usual, Murakami combines fact and fiction in an utterly incomprehensible way.
