"A warning to new readers of Haruki Murakami: You will become addicted.... His newest collection is as enigmatic and sublime as ever." —San Francisco Chronicle
Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit Murakami’s ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and entertaining.
"A warning to new readers of Haruki Murakami: You will become addicted.... His newest collection is as enigmatic and sublime as ever." —San Francisco Chronicle
Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit Murakami’s ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and entertaining.
Critiques-
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Starred review from June 12, 2006
Reviewed by
Lily Tuck
One of my favorite Haruki Murakami stories is "The Elephant Vanishes"—part of an earlier collection published in 1991—in which the narrator watches as an elephant in a zoo grows smaller and smaller until finally the elephant disappears. No explanation is given, there is no resolution, the vanished elephant remains a mystery at the same time that the narrator's life is changed forever.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
, Murakami's new collection of 25 stories, many of which have appeared in the New Yorker
and other publications, also describes these epiphanic instances. In the title story, a character who is half deaf, alludes to a John Ford movie, Fort Apache
, in which John Wayne tells the newly arrived colonel that if he actually saw some Indians on his way to the fort that means there weren't any. Everything is a bit off—including of course the blind willow trees whose pollen carry flies that burrow inside a sleeping woman's ears—as in a dream, where explanations are always lacking but where interpretations are plentiful.
In "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; the disaffected woman—a lot of Murakami's characters are handicapped or incapacitated in some physical way—in "The Shinagawa Monkey," loses her own name; in "Man-Eating Cats," the narrator's girlfriend disappears and as he searches for her finds that "with each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into a quicksand where my identity vanished."
Murakami's stories are difficult to describe and one should, I think, resist attempts to overanalyze them. Their beauty lies in their ephemeral and incantatory qualities and in his uncanny ability to tap into a sort of collective unconscious. In addition, a part of Murakami's genius is that he uses images as plot points, going from image to image, like in the marvelous story "Airplane," where, while making love, the narrator imagines strings hanging from the ceiling and how each one might open up a different possibility—good and bad. It is clear that Murakami is well acquainted with the teachings of Buddhism, western philosophies, Jungian theory; he has a deep knowledge of music and, also, I have been told, is a dedicated, strong swimmer. In his stories, he roams freely and convincingly through all these elements (and no doubt many more) without differentiating to create a world where cats talk and elephants disappear.
In the introduction to this collection, Murakami writes how, for him, writing a novel is a challenge and how writing short stories is a joy—these stories are a joy for his readers as well.
Lily Tuck's most recent novel,
The News from Paraguay, won the 2004 National Book Award. -
These 24 short stories were written over a number of years by the author of the novel KAFKA ON THE SHORE. Most have elements that border on the surreal, and few can be parsed without recourse to otherworldly explanations. Patrick Lawlor reads the stories narrated by men, which is most of them; Ellen Archer reads those that are told by women. While they each do a fine job, Archer's voice seems more compatible with the material. Almost all the stories are set in Tokyo, and while the narration is necessarily in English, Archer's reading seems more Japanese in pitch and rhythm. Whichever narrator is reading, though, most listeners will enjoy these strange tales, even if they don't completely understand them. R.E.K. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
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Jonathan Ellis, Times Literary Supplement (London)
"A true miscellany [or] more like one of those overstuffed, career-spanning CD box sets...[But] the tales seem to speak with one, very seductive, voice. That voice, in each of these wildly varied excursions into the strange, dim territory of the self, says that someone named Haruki Murakami is still looking, quixotically, for something less fragile, less provisional than the usual accommodations we make do with on the road." --Terrence Rafferty, New York Times Book Review"A virtuosic demonstration of Murakami's incredible range . . . thrilling, funny, sad, moving, scary--all at once. Since 1980, the year Haruki Murakami wrote his first short story, the Japanese author has been a walking definition of genius . . . He is a master of tone, and can manipulate a reader's curiosity at will, [and he] approaches the large subjects indirectly, through mood and bizarre occurrences, and always trusts his reader to be moved." --John Freeman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution"In this extraordinary new story collection by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, reality is ever in danger of breaking loose of its moorings . . . The inconsequential registers as significant in these wonderful stories as people struggle to figure out how to be, and what 'normal' means, if anything." --Joan Mellen, Baltimore Sun"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a satisfying, entertaining collection [and] a solid introduction to the eclectic talents of this master storyteller." --Robert Allen Papinchak, The Seattle Times"Murakami effortlessly conjures modern fairy tales that dazzle . . . These stories are full of wisdom, wrenching us into understanding our innermost impulses by confronting us with the unexpected." --Geoffrey Bateman, Rocky Mountain News"Murakami's writing perfectly captures the way surreal, even seemingly supernatural, encounters can subtly alter the terrain of everyday life." --Sara Cardace, Washington Post Book World"Chance on this writer, and you're lucky . . . Each of these tales is delightfully entertaining, a pleasure to read and to ponder at one's leisure. And believe me, they do stick with you, creeping back into consciousness at the oddest moments, giving rise, quite out of the blue, to yet another surprising insight . . . Read through a selection or two, and you likely will be hooked [on] one of the most fascinating, playful literary minds around." --Lee Makela, Cleveland Plain Dealer"Whimsical, magical, daring or sometimes played with the mute in the bell of the trumpet . . . the best of these linger far beyond the reading of them, creating an aura about the world that for many of us just wasn't present before we read them. " --Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune"As beautiful and metaphysical as anything Murakami, an artist who's at the top of his form, has offered in the past . . . The tales in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman strike a gripping balance between the bizarre and wise [as] empirical reality is bluntly scrutinized, if not entirely undermined . . . He's the rare sort of artist who not only creates uncanny landscapes but effortlessly ferries you through them." --Dan Lopez, Time Out New York"Mysterious and evanescent . . . [The] stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman juxtapose the deeply bizarre with the mundane [as] Murakami explores the loneliness of spaghetti, man-eating cats, romantic alienation, and eyeless, cake-obsessed crows . . . [A] dexterous story collection that illustrates the range and vitality of the genre.
