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johnclough 's review for:
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
by Haruki Murakami
Full review & more: https://jdcloughblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/haruki-murakami-blind-willow-sleeping-woman/
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories written by Murakami between 1980 and 2005. All of the trademark characteristics of Murakami’s writing are in evidence here: the juxtaposition of Japanese and US style, the dreamy and wistful aura of his fictional universes, and, of course, the baffling surrealism. While Murakami’s writing is consistently compelling, I found the quality of the stories in this collection to be somewhat variable in quality; there are a few I found to be brilliant, a couple of total duds, and many somewhere in between. The book seems to find its pace more consistently after the first few stories, but I nonetheless felt that the inclusion of some of the weaker stories detracted from the book as a cohesive whole.
My main issue with the stories that fell flat is that they contained random, bizarre elements that were presumably included to provoke curiosity or intrigue in the reader, but they were so random, out of place, and unelaborated that I actually found them a little irritating. Murakami almost certainly had some sort of purpose behind the randomness. The issue is that they were so unalluring that their presence gave the impression that Murakami was being somewhat presumptuous regarding the level of engagement of his readers.
As an example, take the story New York Mining Disaster. This is a pretty postmodern story, with a fragmented narrative dominated by surreal and abstract dialogue. No problems there per se; indeed, some of the dialogue is quite interesting. The story follows the first-person narrator, who chats with a guy who visits zoos in typhoons, from whom he keeps borrowing a suit to go to funerals, before cutting to a conversation with a woman on New Year’s Eve who claims that she had killed someone who looked just like the narrator. This conversation includes such curious choice cuts as:
‘Do you ever think about freedom?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Can you draw a daisy?’
‘I think so. Is this a personality test?’
‘Almost.’ She laughed.
‘Well, did I pass?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘You’ll be fine. Nothing to worry about. Intuition tells me you’ll live a good long life.’
The story abruptly ends with a half-page, random slice of a narrative about what I presume is a New York Mining Disaster. This inclusion was just so profoundly random, so totally unrelated to the already lose foregoing narrative, that I was actually just kind of annoyed at its inclusion. Does Murakami expect me to pour adoringly over the text to figure out the deep relevance of the connection, or is it a self-conscious act of absurdism, making a point of not making a point? Either way, in this particular case, it fell flat for me.
In most of the stories, however, the narrative is enticing enough that the weirdness is not only acceptable but actually the most evocative element of the story. As an example, the story Nausea 1979 is driven by a totally absurd situation in which a man throws up every day for six months without any other sign of sickness, and receives seemingly connected, mysterious phone calls from a stranger. I found the absurdity here to be laugh-out-loud funny, but more crucially, it inspired a bit of intrigue. Unlike trying to figure out what a mining disaster has to do with visiting a zoo in a typhoon, the reader is actually enticed to wonder over what could be causing this man’s vomiting and what the connection is to the mysterious phone calls.
The collection really peaked for me around the middle, where there were five or six stories that were particularly exceptional. The first of these is Dabchick; weighing in at just 8 pages – the shortest in the collection – it nonetheless stands out as one of the best. A wonderfully constructed, and – this time – exquisitely absurd, Kafkaesque meditation on dysfunctionally depersonalised bureaucracy. This is directly followed by Man-Eating Cats. Here, there’s wonderfully vivid description of the dissociation of a rapid descent into madness. Significantly as well, the seemingly random elements here do fit into the wider narrative: the story about the cats who eat their deceased owner, and the story discussing whether if you become stranded with a cat on an island after a wreck you should share your food with it, reflect the narrative as a whole. Here is an (adulterous) couple who flee to a Greek island after they wreck their lives in Japan. Another highlight of the less surreal kind is Tony Takitani, which manages to squeeze into its 25-page length a compelling intergenerational tale, punctuated by the natural absurdity of death. This is a quietly powerful story with a lot going on in the relationship between Tony and his father, how they seem so estranged yet both become isolated survivors of tragedy. Moreover, Tony’s change from being perhaps blandly rational his whole life to suddenly acting irrationally in the face of grief is quietly profound and moving without being pushy in terms of forcing emotion.
There is much of merit to be found in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Most of the stories are good, and some of them are great. However, as an overall collection, I found a few weaker links detracted from the whole experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the better stories originally featured in The New Yorker (with a few exceptions, including Dabchick). It would perhaps make more sense for the would-be reader of Murakami shorts, then, to scour their archives, where they will also find examples from his other collections.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories written by Murakami between 1980 and 2005. All of the trademark characteristics of Murakami’s writing are in evidence here: the juxtaposition of Japanese and US style, the dreamy and wistful aura of his fictional universes, and, of course, the baffling surrealism. While Murakami’s writing is consistently compelling, I found the quality of the stories in this collection to be somewhat variable in quality; there are a few I found to be brilliant, a couple of total duds, and many somewhere in between. The book seems to find its pace more consistently after the first few stories, but I nonetheless felt that the inclusion of some of the weaker stories detracted from the book as a cohesive whole.
My main issue with the stories that fell flat is that they contained random, bizarre elements that were presumably included to provoke curiosity or intrigue in the reader, but they were so random, out of place, and unelaborated that I actually found them a little irritating. Murakami almost certainly had some sort of purpose behind the randomness. The issue is that they were so unalluring that their presence gave the impression that Murakami was being somewhat presumptuous regarding the level of engagement of his readers.
As an example, take the story New York Mining Disaster. This is a pretty postmodern story, with a fragmented narrative dominated by surreal and abstract dialogue. No problems there per se; indeed, some of the dialogue is quite interesting. The story follows the first-person narrator, who chats with a guy who visits zoos in typhoons, from whom he keeps borrowing a suit to go to funerals, before cutting to a conversation with a woman on New Year’s Eve who claims that she had killed someone who looked just like the narrator. This conversation includes such curious choice cuts as:
‘Do you ever think about freedom?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Can you draw a daisy?’
‘I think so. Is this a personality test?’
‘Almost.’ She laughed.
‘Well, did I pass?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘You’ll be fine. Nothing to worry about. Intuition tells me you’ll live a good long life.’
The story abruptly ends with a half-page, random slice of a narrative about what I presume is a New York Mining Disaster. This inclusion was just so profoundly random, so totally unrelated to the already lose foregoing narrative, that I was actually just kind of annoyed at its inclusion. Does Murakami expect me to pour adoringly over the text to figure out the deep relevance of the connection, or is it a self-conscious act of absurdism, making a point of not making a point? Either way, in this particular case, it fell flat for me.
In most of the stories, however, the narrative is enticing enough that the weirdness is not only acceptable but actually the most evocative element of the story. As an example, the story Nausea 1979 is driven by a totally absurd situation in which a man throws up every day for six months without any other sign of sickness, and receives seemingly connected, mysterious phone calls from a stranger. I found the absurdity here to be laugh-out-loud funny, but more crucially, it inspired a bit of intrigue. Unlike trying to figure out what a mining disaster has to do with visiting a zoo in a typhoon, the reader is actually enticed to wonder over what could be causing this man’s vomiting and what the connection is to the mysterious phone calls.
The collection really peaked for me around the middle, where there were five or six stories that were particularly exceptional. The first of these is Dabchick; weighing in at just 8 pages – the shortest in the collection – it nonetheless stands out as one of the best. A wonderfully constructed, and – this time – exquisitely absurd, Kafkaesque meditation on dysfunctionally depersonalised bureaucracy. This is directly followed by Man-Eating Cats. Here, there’s wonderfully vivid description of the dissociation of a rapid descent into madness. Significantly as well, the seemingly random elements here do fit into the wider narrative: the story about the cats who eat their deceased owner, and the story discussing whether if you become stranded with a cat on an island after a wreck you should share your food with it, reflect the narrative as a whole. Here is an (adulterous) couple who flee to a Greek island after they wreck their lives in Japan. Another highlight of the less surreal kind is Tony Takitani, which manages to squeeze into its 25-page length a compelling intergenerational tale, punctuated by the natural absurdity of death. This is a quietly powerful story with a lot going on in the relationship between Tony and his father, how they seem so estranged yet both become isolated survivors of tragedy. Moreover, Tony’s change from being perhaps blandly rational his whole life to suddenly acting irrationally in the face of grief is quietly profound and moving without being pushy in terms of forcing emotion.
There is much of merit to be found in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Most of the stories are good, and some of them are great. However, as an overall collection, I found a few weaker links detracted from the whole experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the better stories originally featured in The New Yorker (with a few exceptions, including Dabchick). It would perhaps make more sense for the would-be reader of Murakami shorts, then, to scour their archives, where they will also find examples from his other collections.