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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

Harvill Secker, $255

In his introduction to Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami reveals that, after embarking on his writing career  in 1979, he soon became aware  he 'could not fit in well with the Japanese literary establishment,  a situation that persists today'.

So he wrote the short story, The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes,  in which his critics are huge, obese crows with eyes turned to globules of fat, gorging on 'acceptable' cakes and ignoring anything different.  His 'cake' confuses them and they rip each other to pieces.

It's not a story designed to win over enemies.

More than a quarter century after Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Pinball, 1973 (1980) were criticised for being 'popular'  and disdained for their 'western influences', Murakami has  12 novels in English and his  work is also available in five  other languages.

Speculation is that he will  win the Nobel for literature, sooner rather than later, and  with every book the speculation gains currency.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman can only further his cause because there is much to be praised in  this near-perfect collection of  24 short stories, each placed precisely for a mixture of light  and shade, nightmare and dream, fear and solace.

Murakami likens his short stories to jazz improvisation, starting with the smallest  detail, idea or image, 'with the story taking me where it wants to'. Thelonius Monk meets  John Coltrane.

Many of the stories here have already been published by the likes of The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine, and several have been revised for new translations, either by Jay  Rubin - he did The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1997), Norwegian Wood (2000) and After the Quake (2002), or Philip Gabriel - South of the Border, West of the Sun (1998) Sputnik Sweetheart (2001) and Kafka on the Shore (2005).

Among the strongest of the stories collected here is The Seventh Man, first published  in Granta in 1998. There's an imagery here that goes beyond Japanese cinematic offerings such as The Ring and The Grudge. In the short space of 13 pages the reader will become breathless  at the brilliance of Murakami's powerful writing and genuinely frightened by the nightmare that inhabits his words.

To Murakami, death is a part of life and in New York Mining Disaster, he tells a story about funerals in a year punctuated by the deaths of five friends.

The first commits suicide in the bath after buying 'two cans  of shaving cream and a German-made knife big enough to lop off an elephant's ear'. He leaves no note - just an empty bottle of Haig and two cans of shaving cream. Perhaps he was tired of shaving every morning. 'A man's death at 28 is as sad as the winter rain,' Murakami writes.

He attends three more funerals of friends in their late 20s -  heart attack, oil rig accident, car accident - who 'never had time  to realise they were dying ...  like climbing up a staircase  they'd climbed a million times before and suddenly finding a step missing'.

The final death of the year is the youngest, 24, and the only woman, in a car crash. 'One cold rainy night just before Christmas, she was flattened in the tragic yet ordinary space between a beer delivery truck and a concrete telegraph pole.'

Some lives go on, and the 16-page Tony Takitani is a clear, linear narrative concerning jazz and the necessities of life, and the subtle difference between being alone and being lonely. This was turned into a film last year by Jun Ichikawa, which The New Yorker called a 'lovely, meditative adaptation' of one of Murakami's most popular stories.

In Chance Traveller, Murakami tells  about coincidences, and how they happen all the time but go unnoticed, 'like fireworks in the daytime'. This is about a gay man who tunes Murakami's piano, a talented musician in his own right who realised 'the music world is where child prodigies go to die'.

The story has a dramatic structure that would transfer easily to the stage. Murakami, who studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo in the late 1960s, is a master of pace, dialogue and well-placed silence.

The piano tuner has been estranged from his sister for 10 years. By a series of coincidences, reconciliation is achieved, but not until Murakami has told a sensitive story about how frightening it is to discover you're gay in a world that refuses to understand.

Perhaps the best story in the collection is Hanalei Bay.

'Sachi lost her nineteen- year-old son to a big shark that attacked him when he was surfing at Hanalei Bay. Properly speaking, it was not the shark that killed him. Alone, far from shore when the animal ripped his right leg off, he panicked and drowned.'

At Hanalei Bay, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, Sachi rediscovers through two carefree Japanese surfers her confidence and certainty where before there was only loss and decaying past. This is a simple narrative that captures with unrivalled elegance and economy a sense of the new Japan that is emerging from the collapse of the 1990s.



Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman