BOOK - "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman"

“Sometimes we don’t need words,” reads a line of dialogue in Haruki Murakami’s collection of enigmatic short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. “Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don’t you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.” This particular story is “Where I’m Likely to Find It,” an psychological detective story about a man who goes missing between the twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth floors of his condominium and the man hired to find him. It’s a good enough representation of all Murakami’s work: quixotic things happen in the truest sense, for they are both imagined and real at the same time, like the eponymous Quixote.

These stories aren’t trying to build new worlds so much as to look at the existing one in a new light, an induced jamis vu. Accordingly, more time is spent on the mundane than the tragic, and both melodrama and emotion are held back to keep the storytelling unbiased. Reading a work in which the author is not trying to smack you over the head with a message is a little disconcerting at first, but like his American doppelganger, Paul Auster, Murakami’s work is a rich exploration of humanity’s ever-surprising nature.

As for his prose, he writes with a mysterious frankness, a Zen author writing prose haikus: “A man’s death at twenty-eight is as sad as the winter rain.” Or, “One cold rainy night just before Christmas, she was flattened in the tragic yet quite ordinary space between a beer-delivery truck and a concrete telephone pole.” Both sentences are deliberately normal—he even uses the word “ordinary”—but the context, the pacing, and the overall Murakamian mood of metaphysical happenstance make the stories anything but ordinary.

The subject matter tends to be the same, too. The majority of the stories use a relationship between a man and a woman to launch into a surprising new direction. In the excellent “Crabs,” a bout with food poisoning pollutes true love, and in “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos,” the small talk, colorful anecdotes, and subtle routines reveal whole shades of character. Throw in an underlying metaphor about the longed-after security of a mother’s pouch, and you’ve got a ninja-like story, sneaking up where you least expect it. Subtext and character subsume the plot, like in the story “Man-Eating Cats”:

“I wonder if your child will think of you that way when he’s grown up,” Izumi said. “Like you were a cat who disappeared up a pine tree.”
I laughed. “Maybe so,” I said.
Izumi crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray and sighed. “Let’s go home and make love, all right?” she said.
“It’s still morning,” I said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.

Pithy, perhaps, or reflective of the fact that sometimes you really don’t need words. Murakami knows where and when to use them though. In “Tony Takitani,” a story that involves an obsession with buying clothes, he says little about the outfits; in “The Kidney-Shaped Stone,” he pauses the narrative to describe every inch of a woman’s appearance. Where appropriate, the author chooses to let introspection describe things: the inner self is what he's more interested in after all. “Why were people so different from one another? he wondered. He had been with any number of women, all of whom would cry, or get angry, each in her own special way.” All of a sudden, there’s perspective on the freakish crying of “Airplane: Or, How He Talked to Himself as if Reciting Poetry.”

Not that Murakami shies from the challenge of a creative sentence: his descriptions are fantastic, and always relevant to the plot. Have you ever heard something as absurdly appropriate as “[T]he parasols at each table all neatly folded up like slumbering pterodactyls”? This Japanese author makes no attempt to hide his literary fiction, but like Borges and Auster, he justifies it. The only weak stories in this one are allegorical; their overt thoughtfulness of “Dabchick” takes all the fun out of decoding what’s really happening to this man, trapped in a secret location, trying to riddle out a password from a dimwitted guard. “The Ice Man” is frigid with its own cleverness, and “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes” is a resounding illustration that satire is not his strong suit.

Murakami is a narrator first, so you’ll have to forgive the similarity in tones between stories. The casual treatment of tales like “The Mirror,” “A Folklore for My Generation,” or “The Year of Spaghetti,” makes them seem like long anecdotes, and “Chance Traveler” stretches our patience with the introductory sentence, “The ‘I’ here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of this story.” At least with this last story, there’s a nice little payoff:

“[M]aybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don’t catch our attention and we just let them go by. It’s like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can’t see a thing. But if we’re really hoping something may come true, it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface.”

Like fireworks in daytime, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is filled with explosions that skim just below the surface of our consciousness. If we follow Murakami’s yellow brick road, we can start to make out the substance of this collection—and for what it’s worth, his short stories are far more accessible than novels like Kafka on the Shore. Just remember: there’s no wizard behind the curtain. Every sentence is upfront and clear, which ultimately only makes it all the more mysterious.