First translated and published in English in mid-2006, Haruki Murakami’s latest book of short stories, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” is a stellar collection of twenty-five tales written between 1981 and 2005. With an incredible cast of characters, including a thieving monkey, corporate decision-making crows and a literal Ice Man with “a slight coating of unmelted white frost on his fingers,” Murakami effortlessly blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, dreams and daily life.
Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1949 and currently lives in Tokyo. He has long been preoccupied with Western culture, citing Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan among his many influences. He is also a huge jazz fan (he once owned a small jazz bar in Tokyo) and his love of music infiltrates his work—many of his novels are titled after song lyrics, such as Nat King Cole’s “South of the Border, West of the Sun” and the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” His first novel was published in 1979 and he has since received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Asahi Prize in Japan. His work has been translated into forty languages and his short story “Tony Takitani” was recently turned into a 75-minute feature film by director Jun Ichikawa. Though Murakami is known mainly for his novels, many of the short stories found in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” were originally published in magazines such as “McSweeney’s,” “Granta,” “Harper’s” and “The New Yorker.”
Murakami is fearless when it comes to delving deep into the psyche of his characters and rooting out the strange obsessions and quirks that make them tick. He carefully depicts their quotidian lives and takes immense pleasure in portraying the mundane details. In “Birthday Girl,” Murakami tells the story of the interactions between a young waitress and a mysterious restaurant owner who requires his restaurant manager to deliver roasted chicken to his room every night at 8 p.m. sharp, and who may or may not be capable of granting wishes.
Murakami’s attention to detail and his forays into the supernatural world ensure that each story haunts the reader long after it is read; though some are only a dozen pages, the intensity of the grief, nostalgia and emotional isolation that plague the “ordinary people” Murakami writes about makes them hard to forget. Other particularly spellbinding stories include: “The Year of Spaghetti,” in which a man deals with loneliness by making spaghetti for dinner every night for an entire year; “Aeroplane: Or, How He Talked to Himself as If Reciting Poetry;” “The Ice Man” and “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day.”
“I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy,” Murakami writes in the introduction to the book. “If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.” Murakami’s garden blossoms brilliantly in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” and it is a wonderful introduction to the author’s work for a first time reader.
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