The Guardian / Data: 8/7/2006
A hole in the middle of the Pacific
Haruki Murakami's latest collection of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is a delight, says Tobias Hill
It takes a certain amount of guts to write a whole story about vomiting. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the author's third collection of short stories to be published in English, and the vomiting story - "Nausea 1979" - is trademark Murakami: by turns disturbing and delightful, funny strange and funny ha-ha. The narrator is typical too: an anonymous man with a passion for jazz. The protagonist is a fellow jazz buff who also has a second passion - sleeping with his friends' wives. His vomiting lasts 40 days and 40 nights, is accompanied by frightening prank calls, and ends as mysteriously as it began - as does the story itself. The two friends can find no explanation for the curse, and the prank caller remains unidentified. It might sound a disappointing narrative - and Murakami can seem disappointing at first - but "Nausea 1979" is a story that sticks in the mind, and in this, too, it is characteristic.
In many of these stories, narrative tension is prolonged by a refusal to explain; Murakami's ghost stories and murder mysteries remain ghostly and mysterious. Has the serial adulterer been cursed, or does his nausea have nothing at all to do with his predilection for deceptive seduction? Murakami never says, and the result, as in so much of his work, is profoundly memorable. As an independent publisher, Harvill published Murakami beautifully for some years, and, happily, as Harvill Secker it is continuing the tradition; Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a handsome volume of prose, every bit as substantial as a novel, bringing together 25 stories written over three decades and augmenting them with an introduction from the author. In this Murakami mentions the fact that although he sees himself as a novelist, many of his readers prefer his short stories. The preference is understandable. Murakami's novels are meandering things, full of delights, but often frustrating in their combination of brilliance and laxity, and with a surrealism that can become tiresome over the long haul. His short stories contain the same abundance of brilliance, but also have a balance and poise that allow his writing to shine. The stories in this collection have all of Murakami's characteristic strangeness, but they combine the strangeness with structure. They show him at his very best; not as a cult novelist but as a really first-rate writer of short fiction.
The works in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are not arranged chronologically, but the progression of Murakami's style is clear and interesting. The earliest stories are so surreal as to be almost impossible to summarise: "A 'Poor Aunt' Story" is - sort of - a story about an author who tries to write a story about a subject of which he knows nothing, poor aunts, and is cursed for his presumption with a phantasmal poor aunt who clings to his back, a fate so awful that no one wants to know him. Realising his error, he wishes he had written a story about anything else - umbrella stands, for example: "I'd have been better off with an umbrella stand up there. Maybe then people would have let me into their cliques. I could've painted the umbrella stand a new colour twice a month and gone with it to all the parties. 'Alriiight! Your umbrella stand is pink this week!' somebody says.
" 'Oh yes,' I answer. 'Next week I'm going for British green'."
In the more recent stories there is less sheer joy in language, fewer pyrotechnics, but there is more patience with characters and narrative, and many of the most powerful stories in the collection are new. The most vivid pieces in the book are also often the simplest. "A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism" tells the story of a furniture-seller's lifelong love for his high school sweetheart, and is outstanding despite (or perhaps because of) the absence of umbrella stands and cursed aunts. The collection closes with five pieces published together in Japanese as Strange Tales from Tokyo, and these, too, are marvellous, their surrealism leavened with and strengthened by the author's growing skill and patience. Elsewhere, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman contains the full menagerie of Murakami motifs: cats, ghosts, a monkey who steals people's names, and a great deal of spaghetti.
One story, "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes", lampoons the Japanese literary establishment: Murakami's critics become crows who have pecked out one another's eyes. Murakami has spoken about the criticism he has received within Japan, his own explanation for it being that the literary establishment there disapproves of his use of popular culture; but this feels like an incomplete explanation, since this isn't exactly what his work reflects. Much more striking in these stories, as in his novels, is the absence of Japanese culture - modern or otherwise - and the overwhelming presence of western cultural icons. Murakami's characters do not watch Kurosawa or follow the sumo. They go to Starbucks and watch Hitchcock. They also love Balzac, Bach and West Coast jazz, and they do not do so in isolation. If the protagonists in this collection were all assembled, they would discover a series of typically Murakami-like freakish coincidences about themselves; not only does one of them like Balzac, but they all do; they all prefer spaghetti to sushi; they all find solace in Debussy, Dickens and Descartes.
The more one reads of Murakami, the odder this becomes. Initially it can seem like a simple bad case of name-dropping, but there is an obsessiveness about it which has its own energy. Like Don DeLillo, Murakami is a writer whose characters often act out of character, functioning as voicepieces for the author's own passions; but unlike DeLillo, whose passions are homegrown, Murakami is forever looking elsewhere. He writes around his country as if he means to cut a hole the size of Japan in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The lasting effect is not that of a Japanese writer trying to write about the west, but of a writer whose relationship with his own culture is as complex, strange and powerful as the stories he creates.
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The Guardian / Data: 25/6/2006
When three cats ate my brain
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami, offers ample proof that he does indeed 'write weird', says David Jays
The narrator of 'Chance Traveller' introduces himself as writer Haruki Murakami, so I guess we should trust him when he insists he's simply 'not interested' in occult phenomena. Yet his fiction is spotted with disappearances and coincidences, freak weather, strange animals and puzzles of space and time. In interviews, the Japanese writer insists: 'I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird.'
Weirdness fills these engrossing stories from throughout Murakami's career. People disappear without trace. Typhoons lash a zoo and snatch small children. Kangaroos are just peculiar. Against this, the landscape of middle-class life fades to grey: a woman who visits a counsellor when she repeatedly forgets her own name is dismayed to hear herself describe a life of flat regularity, of 'washed-out scenery stretching out endlessly to the horizon'. The intrusion of unlikely chance or talking monkeys doesn't so much flatten the texture of everyday life further but make it more real and easier to apprehend. Peculiarity jolts protagonists into a position where they can better contemplate loneliness and death.
An early tale, 'The Mirror', might seem a standard story of the unexpected (man confronted by own independent reflection), but is yanked towards something upsetting by the reflection's violent sense of loathing: 'Inside it was a hatred like an iceberg floating in a dark sea.'
Murakami has perfected a note of elegiac horror, but even his ickiest plot devices are steeped in a quizzical anxiety. The narrator of 'Man-Eating Cats' has a nightmare about - ooh, go on, guess: 'The three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick, my consciousness flickered like a flame and died away.'
This isn't just a horror show, despite those squirming, sandpapery tongues, but the gentle, half-reluctant will to renunciation. (Murakami has admitted that 'the short story is a kind of experimental laboratory for me as a novelist'.) Oblivion is both feared and desired throughout the collection. Some characters long to embrace disappearance, some to escape it - perhaps it depends on how much you need to lose.
Motifs recur from tale to tale. Holiday resorts are favourite locations, long summers when time stretches, hovers above the chopped-up routine of everyday life. Animals accentuate human singularity: nothing makes us seem more incongruous than putting us alongside kangaroos or gorillas. Although Murakami's style and deadpan humour are wonderfully distinctive, his emotional territory is more familiar - remorse, unresolved confusion, sudden epiphanies - though heightened by the surreal. In 'The Seventh Man', one of his saddest stories, the narrator recalls the wave that reared up during a freak storm and engulfed his childhood friend. Ever since, regret and fear have worked deep into his bones, but eventually he forgives himself, and '40 long years collapsed like a dilapidated house, mixing old time and new time together in a single, swirling mass'.
The past is often a problem in Murakami's fiction. It hangs around and will consume you if you let it. One woman falls for an ice man, with icicle eyes and frost on his fingers, and marries him despite her family's reservations ('What happens if he melts?'). He tells her: 'I'm not interested in the future. Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away.' The couple go to the South Pole, which turns out to be 'lonelier than anything I could have imagined' (she asks where the penguins are, but no one knows), and ends up immured in the past. As so often in Murakami, identity seems no more than a line drawn around emptiness.
His early American-inflected fiction was controversial in Japan. One fable here shows the literary establishment as a flock of sightless crows, feeding only on what they know. Murakami's offerings provokes them to a bewildered bloodbath: 'The stimulus was too strong.' His popularity in the West (which began with the 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood, and the dazzling collection The Elephant Vanishes) has less to do with provocation and more with a bonkers beguilement and sidelong emotion. He has also been well served in translation, and it's possible that fiction that evokes a layer of disconnection can only benefit from this linguistic shift.
This collection spans his career and ends with five stories recently published in Japan as Strange Tales From Tokyo. As the author admits, this title would embrace most of his output, but these do have a greater amplitude, integrating the uncanny more gently into the narrative.
Paranormal elements - a husband who vanishes between the 24th and 26th floors of his apartment building, a light-fingered, talking monkey - again draw attention to a yearning to disappear, to the refusal of unconditional love. For all its peculiarity, Planet Murakami offers a recognisable landscape of our fears.
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A young man accompanies his cousin to the hospital to check an unusual hearing complaint and recalls a story of a woman put to sleep by tiny flies crawling inside her ear; a mirror appears out of nowhere and a nightwatchman is unnerved as his reflection tries to take control of him; a couple’s relationship is unbalanced after dining exclusively on exquisite crab while on holiday; a man follows instructions on the back of a postcard to apply for a job, but an unknown password stands between him and his mysterious employer. In each one of these stories Murakami sidesteps the real and sprints for the surreal. Everyday events are transcended, leaving the reader dazzled by this master of his craft. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is Murakami’s most eclectic collection of stories to date, spanning five years of his writing. An introduction explains the diversity of the author's choice.
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