SLEEP by Haruki Murakami

Me and Murakami have a very difficult relationship.  It started few years back when a friend gifted me "Norwegian wood". It is like this: I read him, I don't dislike him, or his writing, but when I finish his books I am always like: and so?. I also created a book club to read "Kafka on the shore" to try to discuss with others on what I was missing of this writer.  If you are asking why I tell you it is because I really want to find what people love of him, and I don't.
So I had given up, untill my mum gave me this little book full of nice drawings, and I decided to give him another try. I started the book and I really liked it, I was so much into this magic story, these nice drawings making you live in a dream.  Then I reached the last  page and I wanted to scream at him:  you did it again  Mr. Murakami, you cheated me!!. One thing is to finish with an open end, another is to not finish a book,   'cause this is exactly what he does for me.
I am sorry, I just can't see it, I just can't!
Actually from today I stop to be sorry about it, he is just not for me...

Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki

Last week was the "World Book Day" and there was this tag going on on the networks #Ireadbecause. I don't think I would be able to describe this in one sentence, but I can tell you that one of the reason I read is 'cause it makes me travel without moving from my chair.
And it is not that I don' t travel, I do, a lot, but travelling with a book is like being hosted by a local who shows you around, the secret corners, the little spots.
This book will definitely make you travel, of course to Japan, but in particular to Gion Kobu, the Geisha homeland.
You will be sent first class to the life of Mineko, and her "struggle" to become the perfect and most influent Geisha. In this memoir we will discover the reason for this "choice", and all the efforts and giving up that this will bring to her life.

I found the book quite sad, as if you are waiting all the time for the next bad thing to happen, but despite that this book is full of courage and lots, but lots, of passion and dedication.

I got so interested and fascinated by the life of Geisha that started surfing for a bit more. I actually discovered that the famous book "Memoir of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden was inspired by the life of Mineko but that Golden apparently had told a lot of lies about the life of Geisha. This is why Mineko finally decided to write her own memoir, to tell the truth about Geisha and, especially about her life. You can understand more in this interview.

Here you can find a traditional dance of a Geisha and here a traditional Geisha's make up.

Lizard

I am not very fond of short stories, they generally leave me with a feeling of incompleteness,  but they are very handy when you travel to go to work as you can finish one in the metro.
This was my first approach to Yoshimoto, and I did enjoy the reading. But somehow all the stories have some weird things happening inside, something supernatural and spiritual. I felt a bit like reading Murakami, and at the end you are not quite sure if you liked it or not. Will have to give Yoshimoto another try to decide if I like the writing.

The Housekeeper + The Professor

The Professor is a man who has been suffering from memory loss after a car accident. His short memory lasts 84 minutes, not one second more; whereas, he has a very clear memory of his past before the accident, when he was a Math professor, deeply in love with numbers, in particular prime numbers.
The Housekeeper, as you can guess, is the woman who takes care of him. Well, maybe it is better to say, the last (in chronological order) woman who tries to take care of him. 'Cause, can you imagine to take care of a person that in less than 2 hours doesn't remember who you are and what you are doing in his house?
In this book there are no names, as it is not necessary to spend time on talking about particulars that would be forgotten in 84 mins. Therefore, also the little son of the housekeeper will just have a nickname in the all story: Root, as the Math symbol √
The relationship among these 3 characters is of course made of numbers, and of the beauty that can be hidden behind a date of birth, or a shoes size. But, despite all, there is a true bond among them that is created during the reading. It is a very sweet book, silent, emotional.
 I highly recommend it!

"The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers."