What's in a name?

"A life without a name, she felt, was like a dream you never wake up from."






If you skip on over to the New Yorker at the moment you'll find a curiously surreal short story by Murakami Haruki called Shinagawa Monkey, which is taken from his upcoming collection "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman."

In all honesty, I have mixed feelings about the story itself, to me it seems a bit flat and devoid of emotional depth. Murakami seems to be covering ground he has covered before (in great detail). All the motifs and themes of his previous work are all present and correct - isolated individual, a past trauma, subterranean depths, a fantastical talking creature - and there is nothing intrinsically surprising about their execution within the narrative.

I don't know maybe its because I read Brokeback Mountain recently and was blown away with intricate way with which Proulx constructed an emotional landscape that existed outside the pages of the book itself.

Even with a basic understanding of the symbolism of monkeys in Japan, I am sad to say that unfortunately I still find the story itself a somewhat trite examination of identity.