A few nights ago, I read “Toni Takitani” from Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. I enjoyed the story, but was a bit disturbed by its first sentence: “Toni Takitani’s name was indeed that: Toni Takitani.” It is incredbily similar to the first lines of a story that I myself have been working on recently. My story (as it presently stands) begins, “Jimmy Castro was often as absurd as his name was ridiculous,” and continues,
“Jimmy’s real and official name was just Jimmy. Worst of all, no one in his family could pronounce an English ‘j’, so he would ever be referred to by others and by himself as ‘Yimmy’.
Other than that similarity, though, the stories are completely different. In any event, I have also just discovered that “Toni Takitani” was made into a film and released in the States last year. Here is the trailer:
Grave Error 