Themes for Dreams

Murakami says short stories are guideposts to his heart. They reveal his creative self

EVEN BY HIS OWN STANDARDS, Haruki Murakami8217;s last novel, Kafka on the Shore, was particularly disconcert-ing. With its exploration of imperfection and otherness, it appeared guaranteed to put the reader half-a-step out of the rhythms of life as it normally is. But if that was a difficult8212;but immensely magnetic8212;book, his latest col-lection of short stories to be made available in English carries a celebratory whiff.

It can8217;t be otherwise. Murakami opens his introduction to the collection with these words: 8220;To put it in the simplest possible terms, I find novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy.8221; In the two decades since the pu-blication of The Wild Sheep Chase, the cult of Murakami has acquired vast myths. His devo-tion to Raymond Carver, his jazz, his cats, his restaurant, and his high standards of physical fitness, scaffold his work as fiction apart.

The short stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman relax some of that obsessiveness. Or do they? As he writes: 8220;One of the joys of writ-ing short stories is that they don8217;t take so long to finish. Generally, it takes me about a week to get a short story into some kind of decent shape though revisions can be endless. It8217;s not like the total physical and mental com-mitment you have to make for a year or two it takes to compose a novel.8221;

The short story is also where Murakami experiments for those novels. They are not necessarily fragments of novels in progress. Take Man-Eating Cats. It reveals some of the puzzles Murakami was trying to solve in Sput-nik Sweetheart. He may have walked away in a week with a fully formed story, but it8217;s intere-sting to compare the short story and the novel for clues to Murakami8217;s creative process.

Murakami has always unsettled purists by refusing to heed the received Japanese aesth-etic and drawing cultural coordinates from the West. It has put him at the lead in constru-cting a global urban sensibility. The short story, with its flight from a single image, a scrap of a dream sequence or a remembered remark, gives him the freedom to strike anchor any-where he likes and chase enduring passions.

It also, alas, gives him the illusion of free- dom to be too cute. Chance Traveller begins with these words: 8220;The 8216;I8217; here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the au-thor of the story. Mostly this is a third-person narrative, but here at the beginning, the nar-rator does make an appearance. Just as in an old-fashioned play where the narrator stands before the curtain, delivers a prologue, then bows out. I appreciate your patience, and I won8217;t keep you long.8221; Eerie Murakami terrain, this, but far too self-indulgent.

Yet, this is what makes this more than an anthology of some great stories. For a writer as significant as Murakami, it gives the reader a backstage tour of a few of the ways his mind ticks and a few of the props that were tested for longer works.