My Rating: 3 of 5 stars

The reason why I picked up this book is that I currently live in Kobe, Japan, and I wanted to know more about what it may have been like to experience one of the biggest disasters involving an earthquake in Japanese history, so I thought that this book was perfect—despite it being fictional. I had read articles and watched documentaries about the disaster, but I assumed that Haruki Murakami could show me a different angle on the subject. To my disappointment, I found the stories underwhelming and not nearly as interesting and well-written as the ones I read in Men Without Women.

My Rating: 5 of 5 stars

I remember telling my mother about my favorite story from this collection “The Caterpillar,” a story about the wife of a quadruple amputee, where I simply retold the story to her over the phone, inadvertently bringing her to tears. This is easily my favorite short story collection and has propelled Edogawa Rampo from an author that I knew very little about, despite my love of the mystery genre, to be my favorite author.