“With the Beetles” - A Short Story by Haruki Murakami - Translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel - from The New Yorker February 14 and 21, 2020

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On August 9, 2009, I completed my first book for The Japanese Challenge “After Dark” by Haruki Murakami. This novel was also in fact my first venture into Japanese literature.


“After Dark” starts in a Denny’s, a comfortable familiar place in the night world of Tokyo. The characters in the story are at once beautifully individuated with just a few brush strokes.
“She reads with great concentration. Her eyes rarely move from the pages of her book….She just keeps reading her book, lighting an occasional cigarette, mechanically tipping back her coffee cup, and hoping the time moves faster”.

As the book proceeds we are drawn further into the Tokyo night world. We meet a number of interesting people along the way. Like Dickens and Balzac before him Marukami brings to light aspects of the city that fall below the radar of those safely out of the margins.

“The garbage trucks have not yet collected all of the garbage. This a giant city, after all, and it produces a prodigious amount of garbage”.

From this start 11 years ago I went on to read all his translated novels published as Kindles and a number of his Short Stories.  I hope to one day join in the Celebration of his Nobel Prize.

I was delighted to find a new story,”With the Beetles” just published   in The New Yorker, readable online at the link above.  My main purpose today is to let my readers know about the availablity
of this story and to keep a record of my reading.

American and English pop music references abound in the work of Murakami.  “With The Beetles” follows a man living in Tokyo from his final teenage years to his late thirties.  It is 1965 and The Beetles are huge in Japan dominating airwaves and record sales.
His girl friend, the first, loves the Beetles though he is more into American Jazz.

One day he goes to pick her up but only her brother is home.  He invites him in to wait.  The longest segment of the story is devoted to their conversation.  The brother has a rare problem with his memory.  The conversation revolves around that, Mozart and brother’s questions about the man’s relationship to his sister.

We flash twenty years forward as we then catch up with events.

Mel u

"Drive My Car" by Haruki Murakami (2015, translated by Ted Goossen, in Arrival, edited by John Freeman)

A new anthology of short stories focusing on travel experiences of diverse sorts, Arrival edited by John Freeman contains a number of promising looking essays and short stories.  Upon looking the collection over, I was very happy to see a new, or at least new in English translation, short story by Haruki Murakami.  

"Drive My Car" centers on an actor, a widower in his fifties.  He is mostly a stage actor but has had success as a character actor in the movies and done some TV.  He was married to a beautiful very well regarded actress for twenty years.  She died of overian cancer at forty nine.  He tells the mechanic working in his Saab that he needs a driver.  He likes to rehearse his lines in the car on the way to the theater.  The mechanic recommends a twenty five year old woman for the job of driver.  We learn the tradgedy of the actor's life was the four affairs of his wife.  Their relationship to him always seemed very good and he does not understand her motivation.  The wife never realized he was aware of her affairs. In a conversation with the driver we learn he deliberately set out to become friends with one if the actors involved with his wife in an effort to find a way to take revenge.  

We learn a bit about the driver and more about the actor as they spend time in the car.  "Drive My Car" is a very interested low key story.  I was kindly given a D R C of Arrival and exoect to read more from it.

I hope to soon post on two recently brought back into print very early novels by Murakami, Pinball and   Wind. 

Ambrosia Boussweau