This review of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami’s latest collection of short stories, is the first in a series of five reviews of short fiction collections.
I love the short story form, and I hold good short stories and those who write them in higher esteem than I do the majority of novels and novelists. With their astronomical word counts and sweeping plot lines, novels give the writer a lot of wiggle room. You can have a bad chapter. But short fiction is just a chapter. The whole thing — words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs — must be strung with such tightness and precision that it hums from the first. There is no room for waste.
Yet Haruki Murakami seems to take a different perspective on the issue. In his pleasingly candid introduction, he refers to what he sees as one of the good points about short stories: you don’t have to worry about failing.
Even with masters of the genre, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver — even Anton Chekhov — not every short story is a masterpiece. I find this a great comfort. You can learn from your mistakes (in other words, those you can’t call a complete success) and use that in the next story you write.
I read this as a tip-off that some of the stories in the collection didn’t make the author’s A-list, and I was soon proven right.
‘A “Poor Aunt” Story’ and ‘The Year of Spaghetti’ were the biggest disappointments, the former a sort of parable bad luck and self-fulfilling prophesies, the latter a micro-tale of a lonely man cooking and eating spaghetti week on week as he sinks into a fantasy life. Each of these pieces riffs on the author’s set themes — loneliness, isolation, the surreal — yet neither comes together in any meaningful way.
I found this really frustrating, especially in the context of the author’s honesty about the creative failure all writers suffer. Well done for admitting it, but please keep them to yourself: I don’t want to read anyone’s B-sides. Why are they here, marring an otherwise fascinating, haunting landscape?
And that landscape is magnificent. Murakami is fiendishly talented, and the majority of tales in this collection left me stunned and satisfied, craving a moment of quiet to wrap my head around what I had just read, but too greedy for the next hit to pause and reflect.
Murakami is at his best when he is directing just enough light through everyday stillness that the whole scene becomes something new and eerie and unexpected. Even on the brightest afternoon, there is a sense of foreboding and loneliness hovering just under the surface, a sunken log to nudge you off course or, perhaps, break you into pieces.
‘Hunting Knife’ stands out as a near-perfect take on the loneliness of just being ourselves. Marrying, having children, falling in love, living in the most densely-populated cities in the world, none of this can change the fact that the human experience is a lonely one. On a beach holiday with his wife, the narrator of ‘Hunting Knife’ nevertheless recognises himself as a solo traveller and observes the overlapping orbits of the travellers around him, fixating on one pair and eventually, unexpectedly, forming a quiet connection that posed more questions and than it answered. We can never really know one another, Murakami seems to say — not in the everyday.
‘A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism’ is another quietly wrought description of a moment, a chance meeting of two ex-schoolmates in an Italian hotel. The author is at his best as he unwraps a now-grown schoolboy’s story of lust and loneliness in an unlikely setting, heavy secrets shared in the reprieve of an unexpected reconnection far away from home.
This story stayed with me long after I put the book down, as did ‘Firefly’, the short story that eventually became the novel Norwegian Wood. I found real pleasure in rediscovering a world I had encountered in a novel in the precision-cut structure of a short story. It was different: not deja vu but a new experience entirely.
In his introduction, Murakami refers to his flirtations with the short story and novel form — the rhythm between them, and the fact that sometimes, you start one and it has more heft or space to it than you thought, and it becomes a novel — as several pieces in here did. For readers who aren’t convinced of the merits of the short story, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman offers a measured, memorable taste of the form. Sad, simple, and evocative of chances missed and lonelinesses gone by, this collection left me wishing for more.
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