Translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen

“Here’s what hurst the most,” Kafuku said. “I didn’t truly understand her—or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she’s dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot.”
Tatsuki thought for a moment before speaking.
“But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?”

Love, loneliness, regret…These are the emotions the men in these stories grapple with. Almost all of them have lost a woman, either to another man or to death. How do they cope?

In “Drive My Car”, Kafuku, a widowed actor confides in his female driver, Misaki, about his dead wife’s infidelity and how he got to know her lover Tatsuki. It takes Misaki, almost a stranger, to give him the insight into his wife’s behaviour that helped explain her to him, long after she had gone.

In “Yesterday” (yes, Haruki Murakami is a Beatles fan), Kitaru tries to set up his friend Tanimura with his childhood sweetheart Erika. Kitaru is convinced that Erika will find someone else and he would rather it was someone he knew and liked. In “Independent Organ”, Dr. Tokai, a cosmetic surgeon who has a string of girlfriends, falls in love with a married woman and wastes away because she leaves him.

In one of the most intriguing of the collection, “Samsa in love” Haruki Murakami takes Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis”, where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he has become a huge insect, and turns it on its head. In Murakami’s version, an insect wakes up in a bed one day to find he is a human, Gregor Samsa. Murakami describes how the insect sees his new body.

“Samsa looked down with dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was. Worse than ill-formed. Smooth white skin with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it…a soft, unprotected belly…gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck… . Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack) survive in this world?” But he has to manage with it, and somehow makes his way down the stairs, worrying about the predatory birds outside. Then a female hunchback locksmith rings the doorbell, and Samsa falls in love.

These are just some of the stories. Each one is beautifully crafted, told without sentimentality. Murakami is a wonderful observer of human behaviour—there are no pyrotechnics here, just people trying to make sense of their lives. 

Translated from Spanish by Lucia Graves

“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. … When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. …Every book you see here has been someone’s best friend.”

Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a place only a few know about and where Daniel’s father, a bookseller, takes him when he turns 11. The tradition is that when someone visits the cemetery for the first time, he or she must choose a book and adopt it, promising to always keep it alive.

The book is set in Barcelona between 1945 and 1955, during the time of the Franco dictatorship. It was a time when people had to be careful about what they did or said or whom they associated with: getting on the wrong side of those in power could lead to your imprisonment or death. Political prisoners are held in Montjuïc Castle, an old fortress in Barcelona, where they are tortured.

That visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books changes Daniel’s life. The book that he chooses—or that chooses him—is The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. Daniel becomes increasingly obsessed with the book and with its mysterious author. Julián Carax was from Barcelona but had disappeared suddenly and was said to have died in a duel.

Daniel’s search leads him to an abandoned house in the upscale part of Barcelona that used to belong to the Aldaya family, once known as one of the richest families in the city. The house seems to hide secrets about what really happened to Carax, and is not going to give them up easily.

Meanwhile, the shadow of the dictatorship falls on the lives of Daniel and his father. The man they hire to help in the bookshop, Fermín, was a political prisoner, held in Montjuic Castle, where he was tortured by Inspector Fumero. Fumero is a nasty, vengeful man, who is out to get Fermín by any means.

But there is more to Fumero. As Daniel and Fermín start to unravel the mystery of Carax’s life, they find links between him and Fumero. Was Fumero involved in Carax’s death? And who is the man with the scarred face calling himself Laín Coubert (the name of the devil in Carax’s The Shadow of the Wind), and determined to burn every single copy of Carax’s books?

I had read this book when it was first published and reread it after hearing of the death of Carlos Ruiz Zafón in June 2020. I remember enjoying it but had forgotten enough to be able to lose myself in the story. It was hard to put down: there are plenty of plots twists, a bit of melodrama and a real sense of place. It’s beautifully written, and Zafón pulls you into his world: a world where things—or people—might not be what they seem, where memories leave scars that don’t heal. And it’s a book about the power of books and stories.

Sometimes a writer creates a place that is so real and so tempting that you want to go there. As a child, that place for me was Narnia, C.S. Lewis’s imaginary world. As an adult, it would be the Cemetery of Forgotten Books: I would love to lose myself in its endless winding corridors and be claimed by a single book.

That’s the best compliment I can pay Zafón—that he still inspires me with the power to dream. I’m very sorry that we will not be reading more books from him, but by giving us the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, he has created an imaginary place that will live forever in the imaginations of his readers.

Translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk

This is a strange, dreamlike book. Four men are on journeys across the Soviet Union that make no sense, in a landscape where the laws of physics don’t seem to exist anymore. The journeys start sometime around the end of the Second World War and last for decades.

The self-propelled barge that Junior Seaman Vasily Khairtonov is on makes landfall on the far east of the country. His senior officer, the only other person left on the barge, disappears without instructions. Left with all the ammunition, Kharitonov puts it all together, combines several spools of Bickford fuse into a single thread, attaches one end to a stick of dynamite in the pile and the other to his duffel bag and takes off across the country. He wants to hand the fuse—and the decision of what to do about it—to a friendly if he meets one. Otherwise he will blow everything to bits.

The driver of a truck carrying a large searchlight rolls on in an endless night long after the truck has run out of petrol, first with a passenger and then with Gorych. They keep going, hoping for a dawn that doesn’t come.

Meanwhile, an airship is flying overhead with a single Occupant, sitting on a stool. The engine has died a long time ago, and it is floating with the wind with no hope of ever coming down.

The fourth traveller on a seemingly pointless journey is Andrey, the youngest son of a family who are part of a sect (though they seem to be the only members). They live in a remote area with no contact with any other person. Into this family comes the Invalid, a commander (maybe), who has frying-pan-shaped loudspeakers that broadcast news from a central command. His mission is to put them in remote places up so people are kept informed. But none of the broadcasts seem to make much sense. He talks Andrey into joining him, persuading him that the young man that he would be fighting for the Fatherland. Andrey, who had been wanting to leave, takes up the offer.

But is the war still on or has it been years since hostilities stopped? No one seems to know, but many are convinced that the battles are still raging, and spend their time fighting so-called enemies. The book is full of absurd situations: a camp for musician prisoners, a commander with his two officers in the forest who is convinced they are surrounded by enemies, a town with almost no men where everyone seems to work in a factory making straightjackets, an orchard with trees that bear no fruit because each tree is planted on the grave of a political prisoner, and the broadcasts from the “frying pans” that ask people to set their calendars to different years, depending on where they are.

Then there is the voice in Kharitonov’s dreams: an Englishman called William, born in the late 18th century, who tells him his story from childhood to after his death. William is connected to the seaman but we only find out how at the end.

In his introduction, Kurkov says that Russian leaders like Yeltsin and Krushchev tried to take the country forward but merely succeeded in returning to a mythical past. He blames this on “Soviet man” and The Bickford Fuse is his way of trying to understand Soviet man’s psychology.

All the men on their journeys—and many of the others—keep going because they have been told they must, there is a war on and the Fatherland needs protecting. There is no attempt to question or doubt, even when the circumstances are ridiculous. The war may be over—or not—but people still keep fighting it. No one really knows what is going on. “Go with the current or you’re done for,” says one of the characters.

This is a strange book that took me a while to get into. Kurkov writes about absurd situations in a very matter-of-fact way, as if they were just part of everyday reality. Although much of it doesn’t seem to make sense, yet it has its own kind of logic. Once I accepted the world that Kurkov creates, I enjoyed its unusual, dreamlike narrative.