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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Marukami
What universe does HARUKI MARUKAMI live in? Not this one. Murakami evidently lives in a world where monkeys are vocalizing cat burglars, men are literally made of ice, where crows determine bakery product lines and with man-eating cats. It is also a world where people eat spaghetti each and every day, go to the zoo during a typhoon, forget their own names or are afraid of phantom mirrors.
It is difficult not to make mention of The Twilight Zone -- and I won't have been the first to do so -- but it is Murakami's particular genius that draws the reader into these worlds and makes their weird rules seem, if at least not entirely normal, then at least not unexpected.
BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN is a collection of 24 stories, each one of which is both peculiar and marvelous. It is pointless, I think, to attempt to describe them: they range from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Tokyo, with stopovers in Lucca and the Greek Islands and even a detour down to Antarctica. The characters run from housewives to jazz musicians, students to businessmen, the animals from cats to crows. Food figures prominently: pancakes, spaghetti, waitresses, cakes populate one story or another. The stories deal with -- and play with -- the nature of life and death, reality and illusion and the entire idea of telling stories itself. The tone runs from tender to detached to sinister. Although Murakami seems, to me at any rate, to use a peculiarly Japanese form of thesurreal, the cultural references, from spaghetti to J. Crew, are almost entirely Western.
If one is not familiar with Murakami, this rich and varied collection is a good place to start -- it sometimes being easier to take weirdness in small doses.
Peter Gordon
28/09/2006
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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