Surreal. That is the word most appropriate to Haruki Murakami’s largely ineffable prose. His collection of twenty-four stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman explore Murakami’s range in his fictional surreality.
While the individual stories range from normal meetings to haunting episodes to fantastic tales, Murakami’s writing keeps the reader turning pages. The dreamlike tone renders everything – from the mundane to the ridiculous – captivating. Even seemingly obvious questions that a novel would address seem to fade in relevance when submerged in one of these short stories.
Suspended reality doesn’t do justice to the respective plots and poetic prose misses the mark. Simple but not overly succinct, informative but not overbearing, infused with music and love and loss, aware of reality but engaged in a greater world, postmodern and contemporary, that is the magic of Haruki Murakami’s stories.
Stories were translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel.
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