By Jesse Cataldo
Coincidences are a lot like dreams; we all experience them, but we can’t bring ourselves to care about anyone else’s. But how can you blame us? Both are impossible to fully convey, sharing a certain elusive unrelatability, a ‘you-had-to-be-there’ quality that inevitably degrades somewhere in the telling. It’s this kind of indescribable experience that Haruki Murakami has spent his career trying to capture. He’s done a good job so far of getting as close as anyone, and he continues in that vein with Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman a career spanning collection that stands as his second proper volume of short stories.
In “Chance Traveler” – the best story here – Murakami, working double as both narrator and author, briefly relates two weird things that have happened to him. He’s told them before and knows they won’t get much of a reaction, but he’s a storyteller by nature and therefore compelled to share. These two coincidences lead into another, a story told to him by a friend, which slowly blooms into a sadly beautiful tale of loneliness and chance encounters.
The coincidence and the dream are central devices in Murakami’s stories; he employs both as kernels of the overall human condition, their isolation summing up the overarching emptiness that essentially defines life. In this way, he strives to examine the unbridgeable gaps that exist between one another.
All of this heavy theorizing seems to promise a dreary, plodding slog, but in its light efficacy Blind Willow is more a bunch of balloons than a ton of bricks. Murakami extends these gaps and places fantastic, surreal instances in their place. Stories like “Birthday Girl” relate indescribable experiences with a gentle closeness, framing them as bittersweet elegies to now-locked moments of the past. Even the darker stories (The Mirror, Nausea 1979) never feel dreary, and their creepy atmospheres apply a darker pall to counterbalance the airier bits.
Even so, Murakami’s works thrive on loneliness, and their use of bizarre, singular experiences typify that kind of feeling. The distance of time is also a factor – almost all of the stories describe past events – and the narrative often finds itself wading through the mounds built by its shifting sands. In both cases gulfs are created and in both cases his characters battle to overcome them; lonely people collide, form a bond, and then split – often thanks to a secret on one’s part. These splits and secrets demonstrate the distance that always will exists and how easily it can rift even wider. Disappearance is a key motif here, as it was in his first collection, The Elephant Vanishes and in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where it provided the starting point for a sprawling novel. In Murakami’s world, relationships are painfully fragile things always in danger of breaking.
On a fundamental level, Murakami is not a great writer, his use of simile is terrific and often weirdly spot-on, but overall he lacks any kind of descriptive virtuosity. His stories are plain-spoken and often dully described, and the consistent repetition of similar plot-lines creates an unwanted feeling of deja-vu. Still, few authors can match his stories’ evocative qualities, his ability to tap into a surreal landscape that at times seems to be an inversion of our own.
In “Hanalei Bay” a woman and her son are separated by death. She comes to terms with her loss, but can’t fathom why his ghost appears to total strangers but not her. “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day” and “Man Eating Cats” rework Murakami’s classic plot of two lost souls sharing a respite together before breaking apart mysterious, like pinballs caroming around a vaguely imaginary yet realistic Japan. In stories like “The Ice-Man” the theme of disappearance is replaced by barely visible emotional barriers – walls that spring up between people – reaching towards that same feeling of pervasive internal loneliness. In “A Folklore for My Generation” he transposes this conflict upon his generation while relating it as a story between two people. Like the idealistic youth he grew up with, they find something beautiful, hold it for a while, and then lose it to the cold flurry of the wider world.
In the end, Murakami’s stories are interesting because of their subjects and identifiable in their conflicts. His characters are slaves to the space that exists between them and in themselves and their efforts to patch those holes – with sex, alcohol and love – are instantly relatable.
GRADE: B
