Writings from Tokyo

Prologue: And after a really long break, (I live in a tranquil place away from the bust of city life.. to be read as a place with no entry to the cyberspace), I've decided to atleast relive my poor lil bluggie. There've been a couple of half penned write-ups that i've been scrapping in the back of books, pieces of paper so that some day i might be able to blog it. And now that i m actually able to blog i have no idea where to start from, do i continue chronologically... but giving time no heed, I decide to write about my latest awe..something i've been dying to write about.

"A dwarf came into my dream and asked me to dance. I knew this was a dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So, very politely, I declined..."

And so begins The Little Dwarf, from Haruki Murakami's repertoire of short stories. I believe(& I have mentioned this before) that narration is what makes up a good piece of writing. Creativity & fabrication sometimes just open the door and take a backseat. You can have an inborn talent that brings out vivid, colourful tales but unless there is an orator in you, I believe you are stunted. This is exactly what I think Murakami's works are not, atleast the ones I have read so far. An imaginative raconteur in the true sense of the word, the stories from The Elephant Vanishes make you lean back, close your eyes and soak up each of his lines, like relishing each spoonful of dark chocolate mousse. Kudos to the brilliant translation by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum. He seems to have inherited the forte and flair of the flamboyant(when it comes to inventiveness) Kafka and is very rightly dubbed as the protege of the brain that created the nonpareil Metamorphosis and similar stories.

The above quoted line was so surreal, i read it out aloud to max the other day. It was soo probable, so.. deja vuish. It was like someone had popped in to one of my dreams and recorded it and had actually edited & published the whole thing. All the stories in the collection are first-person accounts, "The Dancing Dwarf" has all the essence of a modern fairy tale, while "Window" is about a guy who works in a pen-club answering letters from lonely members yearning to get out of their mundane lives atleast through a few words. And then there is the title story "The Elephant Vanishes" about how an elephant and its mahout magically disappears one night from the elephant house. The others like "Family affair", "The little green monster", "My second Bakery attach" are equally impressive. My personal favourite however, is "Sleep".. about a wife, who loses herself & her priorities in her family without realizing so, and how she regains her hobbies when after a certain incident she fails to fall asleep in the night. During the day, she resumes her normal routine, while during the night she goes into her world, where she can go back to her books and resume each of her lost past times.

And thus, you live thru each of his stories. You are there listening to the characters talk to you, feeling the same emotions, ready to speak those very sentences penned. Each story is a philosophy in itself. Content with my little appetizer, I reach out for the next book, 'Kafka on the Shore'.