“MOTHER DUMPED MY FATHER,” a friend of my wife’s was saying one day, “all because of a pair of shorts.”
That's the whole premise of Lederhosen, which is, by the way, a kind of traditional German shorts. The way Murakami decided to tell us in a few words what the story is all about right from the beginning and then tried later to explain it reminded me instantly of Dave Chapelle's Equanimity & The Third Bird Revelation. Chapelle opened his special by saying that 'he actually writes jokes backwards'. What he meant was that he tells his audience the punchline in the beginning. Then, he sets out telling random stories about this and that so that everyone completely forgets about the punchline... until it finally arrives. This is when it'll have a double effect.
Yeah... Murakami did it before it was cool.
Lederhosen is a short snack about how frustrating marriage can be, how women put up with men, how forgiving they can be until the final straw that breaks the camel's back. I love how natural and spontaneous that narrative is, even though the beginning confused me.
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