Have you ever watched a great illusionist very closely and tried to spot the single moment, that split second, that explains how the magic trick happened? That’s how I feel when I read Haruki Murakami.  I can’t count the number of occasions that I’ve read and re-read one of his paragraphs, sometimes a single sentence, trying to identify how he does it.  How he creates such memorable, affecting stories from such simple words.  How he conjures up the strange, yet instantly recognizable world of “Murakami Man”.

The latest collection by Haruki Murakami has seven short stories, all focusing on a single theme: men remembering women from their past.  In one story, Drive My Car, a successful actor describes to his chauffeuse his meetings with his dead wife’s lover.  In another and, in my view, the best story in the collection (An Independent Organ), a philandering plastic surgeon recalls for an acquaintance the experience of falling in love.  In Kino, a bar owner describes a single encounter with a woman customer that changed his life.   The stories stand alone but the thread connecting them all is the narrator/protagonist: the slightly cold, detached, ironic, troubled men who seem capable of deep feeling only when looking back at events long past and remembering the women no longer in their lives.

Those who pounce on his books the moment they’re published – I’m one of them – will be delighted by this new collection, even though (perhaps because?) there is much that’s so familiar.  The tales and their settings may change slightly from story to story, from novel to novel, but the strange, distinctive, unforgettable voice of Murakami persists and it’s a voice like no other in contemporary fiction.