Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

I have said before that my favorite author is the Japanese surrealist Haruki Murakami, but until recently, I had not ready any of his shorts, just his novels.

I didn’t even realize that Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was a collection of his short stories when I bought it and I don’t mind telling you, I was just a little disappointed.

I had set my mind on losing myself inside the peculiar, nightmarish world of a so-ordinary-it’s-abnormal protagonist. Each of Murakami’s novels, most notably Dance Dance Dance, Kafka on the Shore and, my favorite book of all time, The Wind Up Bird Chronicles has a way of enveloping you in a world that you don’t think you could possibly recognize, but feels somehow familiar, even comforting just the same.

My disappointment melted quickly after I started.

In fact, this collection reads very much like one of his novels, structured very similarly to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (a novel striking in its episodic nature) in that it weaves carefully in and out of realism, changing protagonists without ever breaking the story’s thread.

In Murakami’s work, the protagonists are often interchangeable because the focus of his work is not how a character reacts to the events taking place around and to him but rather on how minor characters and even the world these strange creatures inhabit react to the protagonist.

How Murakami can take traditional narrative structure and completely invert it the way he does and still manage to create a universe as beautiful as it is mystifying and often even cruel is a testament to how, after all these centuries and millennia, art still has the capacity to surprise us.

It’s been said that there is nothing new under the sun.

Bullshit and fuck you.

In this collection, we encounter men who may or may not be made of ice, crabmeat with worms, staircases in which you can disappear and be spit out across the country for no apparent reason, crows tearing each other apart, ripping out the intestines of their fellow birds in the quest for tasty snack cakes, an absolutely goddamn terrifying mirror, nausea that strikes as if it were a villain with its own mind, a one-legged surfer ghost and my favorite, an employee of the Public Works Department who just can’t wait for an excuse to beat up, kill and/or torture a talking monkey.