A mysterious man promises to grant a girl a wish on her 20th birthday, but it is never clear what the wish was or if it was ever really fulfilled. Another man vomits, regularly but inexplicably, for 40 days in a row. A private investigator is on a quest for something shaped like a door, or an umbrella, a doughnut or maybe an elephant.
These are three of the characters and their respective situations that are introduced in Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. The collection spans nearly all of Murakami's career as a fiction writer, including two of his first short stories, which he began in 1980. Short stories fit in with the flow of his life, absorbing his time in between novels. In Murakami's novels there is usually a mission to be accomplished, a coming-out-at-the-other-end that is the goal. In contrast, his short stories rarely reach this goal.
Without crossing over into magical realism, the magic and the real brush against each other in a way that leaves both intact by the end of the story. Because of this separation, Murakami can comment on contemporary issues and what most would consider "real life."
In the title story, a young man takes his nearly deaf cousin to an ear doctor's appointment at an unfamiliar hospital. While waiting for his cousin, he sits in the hospital cafeteria, remembering a time in his life when he frequently visited a different hospital. He recalls a mythical poem a girl he knew once wrote while in the hospital. Eventually, the little cousin returns, interrupting the man's recollections of the girl's story. As the cousins discuss deafness, the young man returns to memories and regrets from the past. He feels himself slide into a place where the invisible exists and the visible does not.
Rather than contain any allegorical message, the story seems to best reflect Murakami's creative practices. His universes, with their unique collections of symbols, are much like the girl's invented myth about the sleeping woman. In life, these worlds are inseparable from the mundane, and it is in each contact with these worlds that life is changed. The personal nature of Murakami's short stories, which he describes in his introduction, can be observed in many of his characters and plotlines. A number of the characters belong to the same post-World War II generation that made the transition into adulthood in the late 1970s. Many also share Murakami's interest in jazz, surfing and Western dramatic literature.
The voice of Murakami's typical narrator is also extremely casual and unmistakably that of an adult Japanese male. The two translators for this collection, Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin, have both admirably transferred this tone into the English language. The style is restless and slightly outlandish. It is precisely this tone that has earned Murakami some harsh criticism from the Japanese literary establishment. However, his story The Rise and Fall of the Sharpie Cakes is meant as a fable, attacking those conservative critics who make the rules, kill for the rules and themselves live or die for the rules.
For the reader, the difference between Murakami's novels and his short stories lies very much in the experience of taking in the two. In his novels, the reader is submerged in his universe; the air breathed by Murakami's heroes seems to rise off of the page. Murakami's short stories are less intoxicating, not only for the basic fact of their length, but for their comparative lightness as well. They are entertaining, imaginative and stimulating. Murakami has given his inventive genius full range, focusing on breadth rather than depth. The short stories are, therefore, vital to understanding Murakami as an author. He has also provided his audience with a refreshing break from his usual intensity, while still illuminating some aspects of contemporary
