Review – ‘Manga Stories’ by Haruki Murakami

Murakami’s idiosyncratic work, if you’re not familiar (yet), derives from his Japanese heritage, though not Japanese contemporary literature itself; he favoured translations of Russian and European classics. When he first started writing fiction he was owner of a jazz café, and struggling with debt. He quickly decided his writing was ‘rather boring’, and realised, as an amateur, he needed a path to travel to reach his goal.

Murakami swapped pen and paper for an old Olivetti typewriter, and started his new work in a language in which he had a ‘severely limited’ vocabulary – English.

His syntax was terrible, and he could only write ‘in short, simple sentences’. Complex ideas had to be compressed and distilled into what he called ‘a rough, uncultivated kind of prose’.

Reading his work for the first time, native English-speakers tend to note a utilitarian, ‘flat’ style; for me what was remarkable with his epic, IQ84, was the plainness of both prose and narrative, yet both were imbued with some kind of literary magic that engaged and held me fast. Little of consequence seemed to be happening, yet I was caught in a liminal state of dreamy apprehension that subtle mysteries coiled and lurked beneath Tokyo pavements or behind the mundane counters of corner stores. I was, in the best possible, old-school fairy-tale way, entranced.

These short stories, the first volume in what is intended as a trilogy, have been adapted to manga by Jean-Cristophe Deveney, an international scriptwriter for comics, and illustrated by the prodigiously talented PMGL.

The collaboration behind Manga Stories has been questioned; who needs Murakami’s literary work turned into manga? Does it translate? Does it carry Murakami’s prose and narrative ‘feel’?

This is for each reader to judge for themselves. Deveney and PMGL have played their own styles on work that Murakami himself compared to jazz;

‘All I had done was sit down and riff on whatever came into my head. There were no complicated words, no elaborate phrases, no elegant style.’

Author, Haruki Murakami.

PMGL’s illustrations for this project have been described by some as ugly and messy. I beg to differ; I think the illustrations are excellent, stylised and explorative. And, after all, when a writer hands their project to film makers or illustrators, it becomes their project – new, fresh, and risking success or failure to connect with readers.

The four stories are surreal, silly, illogical, filmic, magical yet real – with much left to the imagination. There are vague presentiments of horror, but without gore or ghosts. There are thoughtful minds behind each layer of this storytelling. Readers of almost any age could browse these and be taken to an odd world, slightly to the side of ours.

This anthology succeeds, for me, in connecting the literary and the less respected form of narrative, manga.

Manga Stories, by Haruki Murakami, Tuttle Publishing 2023, 144pp ISBN: 978-4-8053-1764-8 $34.99

B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author.