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Murakami Madness Digital Download

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In a mini marathon celebration of his long-awaited magnum opus 1Q84, actors Jane CurtinAasif Mandvi (The Daily Show), Campbell Scott (Secret Lives of Dentists), Miriam Silverman (Septimus and Clarissa), Parker Posey (Best in Show) and others perform a selection from the new book as well as a variety of his hypnotic, funny, mysterious, far-out tales. The evening includes special guests super-fan Isaac Mizrahi and Murakami's friend John Wray (Lowboy), who interviewed him for The Paris Review.

1Q84 (Chapter 1)
In the fabled year of 1984, a woman finds herself on the way by taxi to carry out an assassination (not her first) of a businessman singled out as a profligate wife-abuser and torturer, and when she gets stuck in a traffic jam on an elevated roadway, she exits the cab, scoots among the stalled cars, and climbs down to street level by means of a construction-site stairway that might as well be a rabbit hole. So begins the first chapter of the new bestseller 1Q84

Commentary by Isaac Mizrahi

Ice Man
A realistic fantasy where a young woman, naturally enough, falls in love with a man of ice much to her family's dismay, "And listen, they went on, he's an Ice Man, so what happens if he melts."  He tells her: 'I'm not interested in the future. Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away.'

Commentary by John Wray

The Mirror
The narrator sees someone who appears to be both himself and not himself in a mirror and then finds out the mirror does not exist.  A story that explores if it is really true that "the most frightening thing in the world is our own self"?

Airplane
A 27-year-old woman with a small child insists she is happily married, yet keeps crying to her perplexed 20-year-old lover, whom she claims talks to himself about flying. "I sometimes think that people's hearts are like deep wells," she says. "Nobody knows what's at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in awhile."

Lederhosen
A pair of those Alpine shorts leads to the divorce of a long-married Japanese couple. In a kind gesture, the wife goes to a special lederhosen store outside Hamburg to buy her husband a pair. He isn't there to try them on for a snug fit, as the proud shopkeepers insist, so she drags a man in off the streets who has the same build as her husband. Seeing the stranger's bare skin, legs and belly as he prances in the shorts, she suddenly realizes she's hated her husband all through their years together and files for divorce.

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