New Yorker Fiction Review #207: "The Wind Cave" by Haruki Murakami

Review of a short story from the Sept. 3, 2018 issue of The New Yorker...

Nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but then again Haruki Murakami short stories never are and are not attempting to be and, frankly, even most short stories that are attempting to be ground-breaking rarely are. That's the nice thing about short stories, the shorter format and time commitment means they are free to just exist. They don't necessarily have to take you anywhere, like you expect a full-length novel to do.

And Haruki Murukami is one of the masters of the "story that simply exists." I wonder if it is something cultural? I find that authors from outside the U.S. seem to be a bit more free to use elements like magical realism (which Murakami uses a lot of) and also to write these stories that are beautiful but don't really go anywhere (P.S. in comparison to most of those kinds of stories, "The Wind Cave" is like an action/adventure story). It would take someone with more degrees in literature and more time than I've got in order to fully develop this line of inquiry, but I'm sure someone out there has delved into it.

Anyway, "The Wind Cave" like most of Haruki Murakami's fiction, leaves you sort of wistfully bemused and satisfied, if at the same time you're not 100% sure what exactly it was you just read.