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.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

If you’ve never read anything of his, the best way I can describe his work is to tell you that I can’t imagine anyone but David Lynch translating one of his novels into film. (Okay, maybe Jodorowsky or Bunuel.) Murakami, like Lynch has a way of creating a universe that is completely contrary to everything we know, but entirely believable. This is a universe that we are drawn to on the one hand but on the other hand, wouldn’t want to come within a thousand miles of. His characters’ most mesmerizing trait is that they are just so goddamn ordinary. Like Hitchcock, Murakami paints an everyman and then throws him into the unexplainable just to see how an ordinary person would react to it. Murakami gets this pitch perfect. Their reactions are believable and the secrets about them that are slowly revealed are blasé and beguiling at the same time. I’m not sure that he’s ever going to top Noboru Wataya from The Wind Up Bird Chronicles as far as excellent villains go, but here, he comes damn close. Again, our primary villain, Shirakawa, is just so common and his motivation so simple, (he had to do it) that we’re left scratching our heads which may not sound like a compliment, but it is. So, for the uninitiated, please read something, anything of Murakami’s. For those of you who love chick stuff, Sputnik Sweetheart or Norwegian Wood may be a good introduction of his world. For those who are more bold, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is one of those books that just might change the way you look at literature forever.