A giant talking frog asks for the help of an ordinary businessman to help him save Tokyo from a disastrous earthquake. A woman hires a private investigator to find her missing husband. Another woman recounts her 20th birthday when she met an odd restaurateur who offered her a wish. A man revisits his coastal childhood home where the death of his friend during a typhoon haunts his entire life.
Japan’s most famous literary author being adapted into Japan’s most famous literary medium, manga - it seems an obvious pairing and yet one I haven’t come across before. And yet, what I thought would be two great tastes that taste great together unfortunately isn’t. Nor would I say it even really is “manga”.
This book collects four Murakami stories: Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, from after the quake, and Where I’m Likely to Find It, Birthday Girl, and The Seventh Man, all from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Blind Willow is the only Murakami short story collection I’ve not read but Birthday Girl has been published outside of this so I’d read half of the stories in this book before.
Super-Frog always felt like the most manga-esque of Murakami’s stories so I think it’s an apt choice. Generally though, I don’t think the stories chosen for this book are the most visually interesting of Murakami’s. Where I’m Likely to Find It and Birthday Girl both highlight this well - they’re both stories of an ordinary urban landscape with ordinary people. Super-Frog has the strange visual of the giant frog and The Seventh Man has the image of the typhoon and the little boy, but otherwise I’m not sure the stories here jump out as ripe for manga adaptation.
And let’s talk about the visuals because, man, the art in this book is UGLY. This doesn’t look like most manga at all and it has a lot of oddly edgy lines and warped figures that both seem scratchy and compressed at the same time. Also, technically, manga is comics originating in Japan - the publisher of this book is American, one of the adapters - Jean-Christophe Deveney - sounds French or at least European, and who knows about the artist with a name like “PMGL”. It looks like, probably because it is, a western comic featuring Japanese people with source material from a Japanese author. Is that manga? Nope.
I never really liked Super-Frog - it was the most memorable story in after the quake but only for the premise - so it’s ironic that the one that seemed the most manga of the bunch turned out to be far from the best in both collections. That and Birthday Girl are accurate adaptations of the stories, as I assume the other two are, and the stories from Blind Willow aren’t bad - they’re not the most gripping of narratives but they’re not completely dull either.
Still, reading this book made me wonder if we even need manga adaptations of Murakami’s stories? His work is accessible enough and I feel like they read better in their original non-comics format. So I’m not sure who the audience is for this one. I also think most manga fans would be expecting more traditional, if not higher quality, manga art than the frankly garbage art in this book.
Haruki Murakami Manga Stories isn’t a total waste of time as most of the stories have a moment or two of magic in them, though this is down to the original author rather than anything contributed by the adapters. So I would recommend anyone interested in reading Murakami’s short stories to go straight to the original source rather than pick this one up, or at least continue holding out for a worthy, and true, manga adaptation of his work.
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