Midnight Spider Monkey -- The Murakami Haruki Series

Author: (Japanese) Haruki Murakami, (Japanese) Ayano Ando, translated by Lin Shaohua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: Haruki Murakami's 36 ultra-short stories, with bizarre concepts, humorous and witty, full of avant-garde elements; Ayano Ando's 36 colorful illustrations, lively and adorable, full of fun, with a Japanese touch. The collaboration between renowned writers and painters has created this artistic masterpiece of text and image. The book is exquisitely designed with vibrant colors, suitable for leisure reading and also holds collectible value. The short pieces in this book (though the term is a bit awkward, but I couldn’t think of a better one) were, frankly, originally used for magazine series advertisements. Some of the works were used for J·Pres suit, and the second part for Parker pens. But if you ask whether the content of the works is related to suits and pens, then you can say there’s no connection at all. I just wrote some things that resembled short stories at will, and Ayano Ando added the illustrations, merely filling in the product advertisements beside them, that’s all. The J·Pres series was published in MEN’SCLUB, and the Parker pen series appeared in The Sun. As for how much actual effect the advertisements had as ads, I have no idea, and I’m sweating profusely. Frankly, I’d rather not think about it. The initial proposal and commission for this series of advertisements was by Chizuru Tani. He said, “Hey, just write some short pieces. Treat it as a pastime, it won’t take much effort.” As a result, I wrote one such piece a month for several years. The work was so interesting that a few years later, Ando and I decided to do it again—with Parker pens as the advertisers this time. So, the Parker pen series still used Tani’s original proposal, just with a different medium. Perhaps some readers might think that writing this short piece every month would be a lot of pressure (though in fact, no one ever said that), but frankly, it wasn’t. This is because when serializing these short pieces……