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Equally at Home in this World and the Other: A Review of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

by Stephen Phelan?

They are always weird, often bleak and generally dedicated to the proposition that loneliness is the only absolute fact in the cosmos, but Haruki Murakami's books have become a source of comfort. When he revealed that he writes "to be kind", he probably explained his appeal better than his fans could. And in his intro to this collection, he says his stories "are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left behind ... guideposts to my heart."

In some of them, to be honest, Murakami's heart is so hard to find that you might stop looking. The Ice Man, for example, is apparently based on a dream that his wife had, and the eponymous figure in this inexplicably scary Antarctic romance might be an inadvertent self- portrait in prose: "You know I love you, he says ... But the wind blows his frozen words further and further into the past."

He has never been much for the conventional satisfactions of the form. Very few of the pieces in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, which have been gathered from throughout his career, display much depth of character, strength of narrative, or clarity of purpose. What exactly is the point of a story like Aeroplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry? In eight scant pages, we don't learn much more about the protagonist than we would from the title. The dialogue he exchanges with his lover is both banal and opaque, and the image she confronts him with — an aeroplane being built, in a forest, in his heart — a metaphor for who knows what.

But even here, with Murakami at his least effective, you can sense his peculiar grasp of the fathomless, and pick up traces of some distant, consoling authorial signal. Several of these stories were among the first he ever wrote in the early 1980s, and they make plain his influences — Dabchick reads like Franz Kafka's idea of a joke, and A "Poor Aunt" Story describes the summer sun in terms that Richard Brautigan might have used, creating a "kingdom of July".

They also show how and why Murakami's fiction works, introducing the manifestly impossible to the scrupulously mundane, then refusing to reconcile the two, so that strange events, places, and objects become lodged in the brain, forever unprocessed.

In that latter piece, the very idea of a "poor aunt" causes such a figure to appear, a little lady peeking over the narrator's shoulder. "A word," he says, "is like an electrode connected to the mind ... What I have stuck to my back, finally, is the phrase 'poor aunt' — without meaning, without form."

While this kind of stuff is more fun to read than most other authors' early experiments, none of it satisfies like the five stories which complete this collection, all of them written in one month last year, and published in Japan under the title Strange Tales From Tokyo. With Hanalei Bay, Chance Traveller and The Kidney- Shaped Stone, Murakami's work has become so subtle and humane that it makes real life itself appear supernatural, infusing shark attacks, breast cancer, grief, ghosts and magic monkeys with equal mystery and sympathy. These stories seem to confirm that we are each alone, but Murakami's voice assures you that you're not.

The Sunday Herald?
July 2, 2006