Kafka off the shore - Murakami's take on The Metamorphosis

Anyone else suspecting that the New Yorker editors made a bad bet and assumed Hiroki Murakami would win the Nobel and booked a story of his ahead of time - then had to bump it back a week to make room for a re-run of an Alice Munro piece? In any case, the NYer has done as much as any mag in introducing Murakami to American readers, and he's one of the few great international short story writers - I think his stories may be his best work, better than the bloated and meandering novels from his later career. Current NYer story from Murakami - though I'm not sure if it's a selection from a longer piece, its unsettled ending suggests there may be more to come - is called Samsa in Love. Generally, I dislike literature that feasts off other literature - all the stories about Ahab's wife and the father of Little Women etc. - like, make up your own characters, ok? But this story is, at least to a degree, an exception - it's not a plundering of Kafka's Metamorphosis but a complete re-imagining. Murakami had the smart idea that, if a guy could wake up one morning as a cockroach, perhaps the opposite could happen as well - one day, several years down the road, perhaps Gregor Samsa wakes up as a person, and all the weird perceptions that K. described so well as Samsa accustoms to his new state as an insect get reversed: why am I in a room with no furniture, why so hungry - his sense of how vulnerable the human body is when naked, trying to get used his fingers - only 10! - and to learn to walk and to manage steps, his fear of birds. This story starts off great, fascinating, Murakami at his best, strange and creepy but vivid and precise as well. But the story loses its way - as in many great "premise" stories, the writer doesn't quite know how to develop the premise into a plot. Samsa roams around the empty house - where has the family gone? - and a woman shows up to replace some locks. She talks about the troubles in the city - have the Nazi's invaded Prague? We have to assume that's what's happening - and Samsa gets very sexually aroused by her presence, and confused by that. He doesn't understand many of the words she speaks - fuck pray love - and wants to see her again, about which she is ambivalent, and then she leaves. Well, that's not a very satisfying conclusion - it would have been a stronger story had Samsa encountered the family, which Murakami conveniently excises - they are at the heart of the original story and its stunning conclusion with the young sister dancing, maturing. As noted, maybe this is just a section from a longer piece; as a story, it has some great moments but feels like concept or an exercise more than a finished work.