Books
As sad as winter rain
by Siobhan Harvey
Between reality and unreality with Haruki Murakami.
The most affecting story in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of 25 tales by Kyoto-born writer Haruki Murakami, is titled “New York Mining Disaster”. In it, a nameless narrator charts the way in which he and his dying young friends “straddle the divide between reality and unreality (or unreality and reality)”. It’s a phrase that illuminates the critical definitions of its author. Japan’s foremost contemporary writer, Murakami combines realism and surrealism in his oeuvre – eight novels and two story collections.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, however, is like no other Murakami book because it brings together the first story he ever published internationally, the most recent and the plethora in-between. This spread of work is telling, for it realises a literary continuum – the perpetual biting realism that has driven Murakami’s work from the start. For this, and many other reasons, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is an essential read.
“A man’s death at twenty-eight is as sad as winter rain,” the narrator of “New York Mining Disaster” tells us. The collection is full of unidentified storytellers, ghosts recounting their lives. And like the suicides, car accidents and illnesses that bleed away the lives of his associates, Death harries the young everywhere in this collection. In the title story, a young man, accompanying his cousin to hospital, reveals how his return to the familial home began: unemployment, a relationship breakdown and the death of his grandmother from intestinal cancer.
He edges out his adulthood locked in his childhood bedroom, where “everything had dried up, had long ago lost its colour and smell. Time alone had stood still.” Meanwhile, in “The Mirror”, the “young and impetuous” narrator wanders “all over Japan working at various manual labour jobs … convinced that this was the most righteous way to live”. Even so, he is forced to consort with “the world of death” until he’s driven into social isolation.
Other stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman offer different forms of disappointment. In “Birthday Girl”, “The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema” and “Airplane: Or How He Talked to Himself as if Reciting Poetry”, the middle-aged reflect upon key stages of their lives when their youthful invincibility was irrecoverably lost.
The other dominant modus operandi in Murakami’s stories concerns Man’s relationship with animals. For instance, the narrator in “A Perfect Day for Kangaroos” visits the zoo to see a newborn joey, only to have his entertainment ruined by bestial savagery. Invariably, such tales act as wry cultural observations through which Murakami examines “caged” human beings rather than the imprisoned animals they’re obsessed with.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman isn’t without its esoteric moments. “New York Mining Disaster” is typical of Murakami’s habitual desire to play tricks with his reader – for the narrative has nothing to do with the US or excavation. But the cryptic surface that unlocks uncomfortable cultural truths is characteristic of his storytelling style. It was prevalent for those who wished to see it in his previous story collection, after the quake, which fictionalised the very real horrors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. But Murakami’s postmodernist experimentation with form and subject matter has too often led critics to home in upon the work’s kookiness and intensity, rather than its realism.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman will go a long way towards redressing this imbalance. Murakami proves that he’s at his best when laying bare the Japanese psyche and building worlds that reveal the lows, hardships and excesses that get glossed over by those who applaud his homeland’s commercial success.
BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN, by Haruki Murakami, (Harvill Secker, $36.99)
