Haruki Murakami Manga Stories 1
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, The Seventh Man, Birthday Girl, Where I'm Likely to Find It
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Haruki Murakami's stories in graphic novel form for the first time!
Haruki Murakami's novels, essays and short stories have sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into dozens of languages. Now for the first time, many of Murakami's best-loved short stories are available in graphic novel form in English. Haruki Murakami Manga Stories is one of three short story compilations, which present a total of 9 short stories from Murakami's bestselling collections.
With their trademark mix of realism and fantasy, centering around Murakami's characteristic themes of loss, remorse and confusion, the four stories in this volume are:
Super-Frog Saves Tokyo: A few days after an earthquake, Katagiri discovers a giant frog in this home. The frog promises to save Tokyo from another earthquake, but Katagiri must help him. Is this real, or is Katagiri dreaming? "[This story has] such an engaging mix of realism and fantasy that it takes a while for you to realize what a sad undertow the story has and how much it says about Katagiri's solitary life, his feelings of powerlessness and his dread of another quake." —The New York Times
Where I'm Likely to Find It: A woman's husband goes missing so she hires detective. As the detective traces the man's whereabouts, he reflects on the meaning of his own life. "A searching Kafkaesque parable about disappearance, loss and coping." —Kirkus Reviews
Birthday Girl: A woman tells her friend the story of a surreal encounter she has on her twentieth birthday with the owner of the restaurant where she works, who grants her a wish.
The Seventh Man: The story of a man scarred by the death of his childhood friend in a tsunami. "Although Murakami's style and deadpan humour are wonderfully distinctive, his emotional territory is more familiar—remorse, unresolved confusion, sudden epiphanies—though heightened by the surreal. In The Seventh Man, one of his saddest stories, the narrator recalls the wave that reared up during a freak storm and engulfed his childhood friend." —The Guardian
These new graphic versions of classic Murakami short stories will be devoured by his fans and will provide a new window onto his work for a new generation of readers not yet familiar with it!
**Recommended for readers ages 16+ due to mature themes and graphic content**
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this adept international collaboration, a French comics team transforms four fantasy-tinted short stories by Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) into comics, bringing his vertiginous imagination to life. A mild-mannered assistant bank manager is visited in "Super Frog Saves Tokyo Girl" by a giant Tolstoy-loving frog who recruits him to help stop an earthquake; a tough-talking volunteer detective searches for a woman's missing husband in the digressive noir pastiche "Where I'm Likely to Find It"; "Birthday Girl" centers on a waitress and the celebratory wish she receives from her peculiar, reclusive boss; and a man is haunted by his childhood memory of a deadly typhoon in "The Seventh Man." "What we see with our eyes is not necessarily reality," one character warns, as these dreamlike narratives shift precipitously between reality and fantasy, the transparent and the opaque. PMGL's art amplifies disorientation, expanding and contracting the space within panels and pushing the off-kilter character designs just past the point of typical cartoon exaggeration. He switches up art styles between stories and sometimes from scene to scene. This is a must-read for Murakami buffs and a quirky invitation into the writer's perspective and preoccupations for newcomers.
