Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

by Haruki Murakami

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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

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As Japanese writer Haruki Murakami enjoys great international fame and popularity and his major literary work has been translated into English, a new collection of his short stories offers another enjoyable view of his quirky literary universe. What unifies the twenty-five short stories of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the encounter with the extraordinary, if not outright supernatural, by characters who think of themselves as exceedingly normal or mundane. With great literary skill Murakami describes how these characters are shaken out of their apparently tranquil life when the unforeseen occurs, be it an old lover calling, a tidal wave snatching a life, or a talking monkey stealing a name tag.

Since the short stories collected in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman cover the first three decades of Murakami’s literary career, a reader can detect that Murakami has remained true to his key themes of contemporary urban alienation and the intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary lives as well as to his overweening humanity. Included are two of his first stories, written in 1981 and 1982, as well as many stories previously translated into English and published in various magazines. The final five pieces of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman were published by Murakami in Japan as Tokyo Kitanshu (2005; Strange Tales from Tokyo).

The title story, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” illustrates the special appeal of Murakami’s short fiction collected here. The story is told by a young man who has failed at his first attempts to manage adult life. Now he is accompanying his teenage cousin, whom a sports injury has left sonically impaired, to a hospital. Waiting for his cousin in the hospital cafeteria, typical of Murakami’s fondness for multilayered narratives jumping across time, the young man remembers another hospital visit in his own teenage years.

Then, eight years ago, he and his friend visited his friend’s girlfriend in a hospital where she recuperated from a routine operation. Amazingly, the teenage girl drew a scene from her own poetry on a cafeteria napkin. In her imaginary world, the fictitious plant of a blind willow produces pollen that tiny flies gather. They carry it into the ear of a young woman whom the pollen puts to sleep so the flies can devour her. Attempts to save her come too late.

In just a subordinate sentence, the narrator tells of his friend’s death soon after this visit. Leaving the hospital with his cousin, he muses about his past carelessness and experiences a moment where life around him seems to dissipate. Called back to reality by his cousin, he asserts that everything is all righttypical of Murakami’s characters, who generally survive encounters with the strange well.

Underlining Murakami’s fondness to withhold apparently crucial story details, “Birthday Girl” tells of a young waitress who is granted one wish on her twentieth birthday. This day, fixing the inevitable passing of youth in Japan, appears to pass as a nonevent. However, the kindly old restaurant owner learns of it by accident and promises to grant her one wish. Murakami teases his readers by having the old man commenting on the unusual nature of the young waitress’s wish that the author never reveals. This leaves behind a mystery, as do many of Murakami’s popular stories and novels.

Sense of loss, untimely death, and all-encompassing loneliness are never far from Murakami’s characters. “Tony Takitani,” a short story made into a film by Jun Ichikawa in 2003, tells of a quiet technical illustrator. His father is a drifting jazz musician who does not know what to do with his son after his wife dies suddenly three days after giving...

(This entire section contains 1813 words.)

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birth to him.

As so often happens in Murakami’s fiction, her death, like other potentially life-shattering events, just happens. An Italian American major in the United States Army that occupied Japan at the end of World War II becomes the baby’s godfather and gives him his Western first name. Tony grows up a loner without any emotional bond to his father. Then one day, as mysteriously and as suddenly as his mother died, he falls in love with an unnamed woman. Their marriage is exceedingly happy. The one thing bothering Tony is his wife’s addiction to shopping for clothes.

On Tony’s suggestion, his wife returns one coat and dress. On her drive home, her car gets hit by a truck, killing her instantly. Tony ends up selling her clothes as well as the jazz records he inherits from his father, ending up “really alone.” Murakami refuses to add anything to these last words of his story, making the reader wonder whether Tony’s interference in his good fate caused his misery or whether this is just the way of contemporary life.

Two of his first short stories express Murakami’s connecting of traditional Japanese ideas and contemporary Western culture. Often this is done through his allusions to Western popular culture; sometimes it is more subtle. In “New York Mining Disaster,” just as celebrated French literary critic Roland Barthes was run over by a laundry truck in Paris in 1980 one year before Murakami’s short story was published, so is one of the narrator’s friends. As the narrator says, “she was flattened in the tragic yet quite ordinary space between a beer-delivery truck and a concrete telephone pole.”

In the second early piece, “A ’Poor Aunt’ Story,” the woman companion of the narrator sums up what could serve as a credo for life in Murakami’s literary universe: “We exist here and now, without any particular reason or cause.” This Western philosophical notion tracing its roots to German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and later the existentialists is matched with the millennia-old Japanese Buddhist tradition expressed by the narrator when he states, “The whole world is a farce, needless to say.” This sentiment has been strongly embraced in traditional Japanese literature from the days of its earliest poems and novels, such as the influential Heike monogatari (c. 1371; The Tale of the Heike, 1918-1921). As in his popular novels, Murakami is as comfortable with traditional Japanese themes and beliefs as with contemporary Western popular and high culture.

The collision of Western and Japanese culture is taken up by Murakami for his own post-World War II generation. In his “A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism,” the narrator’s friend is confronted with the unyielding will of his high school sweetheart Yoshiko Fujisawa. In spite of her boyfriend’s urgings in the late 1960’s to discard conventions and plunge into a love marriage, she insists on keeping her virginity and marrying an older man. While the story indicates that Yoshiko is afraid of the harshness of the adult world, there is also a persuading atmosphere of loss and missed chances.

As Murakami states in his introduction, some of his short stories became the basis for novels: “Firefly” turned into Noruwei no mori (1987; Norwegian Wood, 2000) and “Man-Eating Cats” turned into Suptoniku no koibito (1999; Sputnik Sweetheart, 2001). Readers familiar with the novels will enjoy how “Firefly” ends with a dilemma, the narrator’s girlfriend retreating to a sanatorium, which the novel will attempt to resolve. The eerie ending of “Man-Eating Cats,” where the narrator’s lover Izumi apparently disappears into the air of a Greek island, anticipates the conclusion of the later novel.

“Dabchick,” “Nausea 1979,” and “Crabs” are humorous tales incorporating a dose of the absurd. The first tells of an imaginary palm-sized alien creature of that name residing in Tokyo’s underground, while “Nausea 1979” tells of a philandering jazz aficionado haunted by anonymous prank calls that coincide with a forty-day vomiting bout. The third story tells of the discovery of thousands of maggots in the clams the narrator vomits up in a hotel in Singapore while his girlfriend sleeps happily with the same food in her stomach.

Food and jazz frequently feature in Murakami’s stories, and “The Year of Spaghetti” links a solitary cooking obsession to the narrator’s loneliness. “The Seventh Man” visits the theme of guilt felt by survivors of a natural catastrophe. As an adult, the narrator tells of having watched in horror as a tsunami swept away his boyhood friend. As Murakami states in his introduction, the idea for the story came to him while surfing, and his character finally overcomes the past.

The last five short stories of Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow deal with the mysterious. “Chance Traveler” centers on an uncanny coincidence. The same day the gay protagonist’s new woman acquaintance tries to seduce him, which is one day before her second breast cancer examination, the same exam is waiting, he finds out, for his long estranged sister tomorrow. In “Hanalei Bay,” a widowed Japanese mother loses her nineteen-year-old son to a shark attack off Hawaii’s Kauai Island. Year after year she returns to the island until one day she picks up two Japanese surfers who later tell her they saw the ghost of her son.

“Where I’m Likely to Find It” tells of a sudden disappearance and equally mysterious reappearance. A husband fails to return after he tells his wife he is coming back upstairs from his mother’s apartment, two flights below their own. When he is found days later alive hundreds of miles away, he has lost all memory of the intervening time. In the hands of Murakami, the story becomes a perfect allegory of the inexplicable waiting just beneath the surface of routine life.

The last story, “A Shinagawa Monkey,” is one of Murakami’s finest. Mizuki Ando cannot remember her name anymore. Pragmatically, she creates a bracelet with her name inscribed on it after doctors can find nothing wrong with her brain. She does not tell her husband but visits a woman counselor. Suddenly and with a flourish, Murakami introduces the absurd when it is revealed that a talking monkey made off with her college name tag and has been captured in the Tokyo underground. In masterful fashion Murakami adds serious tragedy to the hilariously absurd when Mizuki learns the monkey also took her college mate’s tag. This had been given to Mizuki the night the other woman committed suicide. Mizuki bravely faces the monkey’s revelation that she was not loved as a child and does not really love her husband. When she is given back her name tag she remembers her name again. It is implied that this is the first step to making changes in her life.

Haruki Murakami’s stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman reflect the narrative skill and favorite themes of this successful writer. Darkness lurks everywhere in contemporary life, and loneliness, lack of love, and despair threaten. Once confronted with an uncanny experience, however, most of his protagonists gain a new understanding. Murakami’s stories are moving and well crafted and represent a humane, sometimes ironic voice in the postmodern landscape of advanced societies.

Bibliography

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Booklist 102, no. 17 (May 1, 2006): 6.

Entertainment Weekly, no. 894 (September 1, 2006): 80.

Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 11 (June 1, 2006): 540.

Library Journal 131, no. 6 (April 1, 2006): 88.

The New Republic 235, no. 17 (October 23, 2006): 34-37.

New Statesman 135 (July 3, 2006): 66.

The New York Times Book Review 155 (September 17, 2006): 14.

People Weekly 66, no. 11 (September 11, 2006): 60.

Publishers Weekly 253, no. 24 (June 12, 2006): 27.

The Times Literary Supplement, June 30, 2006, pp. 21-22.

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