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In “Honey Cake” by the Japanese author, the interactions between a trio of students and the nightmares of a child troubled by images of the Kobe earthquake.
The text begins with the story of a bear, which a man tells to a 4-year-old girl to try to chase away the nightmare that is pursuing her. According to the child's mother, she is troubled because she watched too many images of the earthquake that just destroyed Kobe. It was in January 1995. More than a bear, we think of a cat's paw, of a velvet paw, when reading the superb Honey pancakeso subtle and delicate, illustrated by a Berliner, Kat Menschik. The great author Haruki Murakami manages to write about the Kobe earthquake and psychic earthquakes using only what is left unsaid. He does not write directly about the differences in temperament of beings, and therefore about the diversity of their reactions, a subject which constitutes the heart of this book. If we stand back, during a conflict for example, we do not build the same existence as if we fight.
For his study of the human soul, Murakami invents three characters: Junpei, Takatsuki, who are men, and Sayoko, a woman. They met at Waseda University in Tokyo while studying. Three is a bad number: Junpei falls in love with Sayoko and declares his love for her. She's raining
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