Curling up with a good book: The short stories of Haruki Murakami

Titles: The Elephant Vanishes/after the quake/Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Years published (English translations): 1993/2002/2006

Skillfully mixing the mundane with the mystical, the here-and-now with the out there, Haruki Murakami is one of our finest living authors. His style is instantly recognizable and his works are always a joy.

Murakami characters are forever ironing their shirts, or doing sit-ups, or listening to classic rock or jazz, or watching baseball. They hold jobs in publishing houses and department stores, making good, not great, money. The usual stuff. But nothing is never completely as it seems in a Murakami work. Because while you're sitting their listening to your Stones record, a giant talking frog could appear in your living room. Or a girlfriend could simply disappear. Or a stone could assert otherworldly powers on the person who finds it. His work is frequently eerie and at times unsettling. Also too, it can be very funny.

But a Murakami work is never abstruse--indeed legend has it that Murakami got the idea for his first novel while watching a baseball game and just gave it a try, simply to see if he could write a novel. The common man touch is ever-present. But Murakami's works are also very thought-provoking--they force you to look at things closely, differently, examining the most minute aspects of everything. Because the littlest thing could be very important.

The first collection here is "The Elephant Vanishes," comprising stories written between 1983 and 1990. Here is a review by Herbert Mitgang, originally published in the New York Times on March 28, 1993. Mitgang's main beef is that the stories aren't "Japanese" enough, whatever that means (the article is headlined "As Japanese as Burt Bacharach--why Burt Bacharach of all people. I can see the Times editors having a lengthy, passionate discussion on an American who was the closest to Murakami in terms of Japanese-ness. Ronald Reagan? Not nearly Japanese enough. Johnny Depp? Maybe too Japanese. Burt Bacharach. Aah, that one fits pretty good! Actually, the characters in one of the stories listen to some Burt Bacharach records, but I like my little digression and will thus keep it in.). Obviously Murakami is Japanese but he's spent a great amount of time in North America and Western Europe, so it would probably be unfair to expect him to temper his Western influences. Still a worthwhile review, though, and ultimately very favorable.

Few cultures excite or upset the American imagination as tenaciously as Japan's. News of life on that leapfrog of islands streams relentlessly through our televisions and newspapers, alternately offending and enthralling us. What kind of country is this, we wonder, that can produce Noh drama and cram schools, zen gardens and Nintendo games? American writers can't seem to get enough of Japan, which has become for some--Jay McInerney, Brad Leit hauser and John Burnham Schwartz among them--a magnet for expatriate adventuring. For writers like Michael Crichton, on the other hand, Japan is a predator nation out to destroy the American way of business--a convenient scapegoat in a melodrama of economic espionage.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami provides a different point of view in "The Elephant Vanishes," his first collection of stories. (He is also the author of the novels "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" and "A Wild Sheep Chase.") These stories, ably translated by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, show us Japan as it's experienced from the inside. What is exotic to foreigners-- oyster hot pot or pillows filled with buckwheat husks -- is here the stuff of ordinary life; but so are McDonald's, steak and Julio Iglesias. Indeed, Mr. Murakami's Japan is such an unquestioned hybrid of tradition and export that one has to read 11 pages into the first story before the most casual reference to a "Tokyoite" signals that we aren't in America. His narrators-- young, urban, downwardly mobile-- are as likely to eat spaghetti as soba noodles. They listen to Wagner and Herbie Hancock, but disdain "stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to rot your teeth." They read Len Deighton novels and "War and Peace," not Kobo Abe and "The Tale of Genji." Their universe is Japanese, but their cultural reference points are almost exclusively Western.

This is a Japan characterized by a peculiar spiritual torpor. Bizarre events take place regularly, but fail to generate much reaction or curiosity. In "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women," for instance, a young man's search for a missing cat leads him into a closed-off alley that passes between the backyards of parallel houses, a path "neglected and untrafficked, like some abandoned canal." There he encounters a sunbathing teen-age girl who, like the alley itself, seems both of the ordinary world and strangely apart from it. But their rambling conversation is too lazy to be truly flirtatious.

Similarly, in "A Window," another young man, this one a writing teacher who works for a correspondence school, pays a visit to one of his pupils, a married woman in her early 30's. Their few hours together eating hamburger steak and listening to Burt Bacharach linger for years in the narrator's memory. "The weather was lovely that day," he recalls, "and over the railings of the building's verandas hung a colorful assortment of sheets and futons drying in the sun. Every now and then came the slap of a bamboo whisk fluffing out a futon. I can bring the sound back even now. It was strangely devoid of any sense of distance." Again, nothing happens. The wife and the teacher are "like two would-be passengers who had missed the same train," linked not so much by a shared passion as a shared sense of absence.

And in the haunting title story, another elephant mysteriously disappears, along with its keeper, from the enclosure where it has been kept as a kind of mascot for a Tokyo suburb. Again, the solution to the mystery hinges on questions of perspective and proportion.

In fact, all the stories in "The Elephant Vanishes" take place in parallel worlds not so much remote from ordinary life as hidden within its surfaces: secret alleys that afford unexpected -- and unsettling -- views. Mysteries are offered that defy solution or analysis. Their purpose, rather, is to point out not only how much we don't know but how much we can't know. As a result, the tendency of certain people and situations to defy description -- to most writers a bane -- becomes for Mr. Murakami something to revel in.

In the story called "Sleep," for example, a young woman suddenly discovers that she no longer needs it. Awakened literally and figuratively, she observes that there is something strange about her husband's face, but finds herself at a loss to articulate the source of this strangeness. "Honestly," she observes, " 'strange' is about all that fits. . . . The one thing I could remember was that his face looked strange."

Likewise, in "The Second Bakery Attack" a young man discovers that his wife keeps a shotgun and ski masks in the car, even though "neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt." One recalls the maxim given by the correspondence-school writing teacher in "A Window," who says to his student: "Don't try so hard to be the penetrating observer. Writing is, after all, a makeshift thing."

Makeshift indeed. Yet even in the slipperiest of Mr. Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out: pull tabs from beer cans lying in an ashtray "like scales from a mermaid"; shotgun shells rustling "like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow"; melted ice working its way through a cocktail "like a tiny ocean current."

"After I gave up sleeping," the narrator of "Sleep" observes, "it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. . . . Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition." In this observation she reveals her kinship with the narrator of "The Elephant Vanishes," who continues, after the disappearance, "to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffee makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of memories I retain from that world." Yet he, like his sleepless contemporary, doesn't live there anymore.

It's as if a kind of social schism has taken hold in this culture so intent on efficiency and productivity, a schism between the visible street and the hidden alley that resists simple resolution. In Mr. Murakami's view, "people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function." The problem, as he notes in a story called "The Last Lawn of the Afternoon," is that "no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another."

No metaphor could suit more exactly these stories in which animals--elephants, kangaroos, windup birds, even a tragically mistreated "little green monster"--figure so crucially. These stories, like the kittens themselves, are "warm with life, hopelessly"-- and, I would add, wonderfully--"unstable."

"after the quake" (apparently, Murakami insists on lower casing the title, according to his fine translator Jay Rubin). The stories here were written in response to the devastating Kobe earthquake of 1995 and are meant to be linked thematically. This is the shortest collection of the three--and my personal favorite. The usual themes--alienation, loneliness, despair--are there in spades. In addition, as translator Rubin says "the central characters in 'after the quake' live far from the physical devastation, which they witness only on TV or in the papers, but for each of them the massive destruction unleashed by the earth itself becomes a turning point in their lives. They are forced to confront an emptiness they have borne inside them for years."

A very good review, originally published in The Guardian on Oct. 19, 2000 and written by an impressed Alex Clark.

"The short story is on the way out. Like the slide rule," pronounces Junpei, a dedicated practitioner of the form who falters over a greater length, and if Haruki Murakami's beguiling collection is intended to be a corrective to that dismal piece of sooth-saying, it succeeds magnificently. But it does more than simply prove that fragments of fiction can conjure entire worlds of thought and feeling in the space of a few pages; by subtly linking each of these pieces to a central theme--that of fragmentation itself--it demonstrates that snatches of narrative might, in the end, be all that we can truthfully claim rights over.

In "Landscape with Flatiron", a painter haunted by the unlikely possibility of dying trapped in a fridge devotes himself to building bonfires with an obsessive craftsmanship that belies his assertion that their sole purpose is to "warm people's hearts". "Stepping back a few paces, he would examine in detail the form he had constructed, adjust some of the pieces, then circle around to the other side for another look, repeating the process several times." It's an obvious comment on Murakami's own writing technique, in which ideas are reiterated and refined until they seem to reach a moment of almost sublime self-effacement.

Each of these stories, as their collective title suggests, takes place in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, but because none of them is directly linked to it, they allow Murakami to examine its effects obliquely, from within his own infinitely nuanced metaphysical world.

If an earthquake is what happens beneath the ground, beyond our sight and immediate comprehension, then so too are our individual lives shaped by psychological and emotional tremors that we find hard to grasp, and subject to numerous unpredictable and violent aftershocks. In "UFO in Kushiro", a character whom we never view directly makes that connection almost instinctively; glued to the scenes of devastation on television for days after the quake, she rouses herself only to walk out on her husband, leaving him with the thought that "living with you is like living with a chunk of air".

To an extent, she's right: travelling to freezing Hokkaido because "cold or hot it was all the same to him", displaying next to no curiosity about the mysterious package a colleague has asked him to deliver, drinking coffee that is "more sign than substance", Komura shows little knowledge of or interest in his own interior landscape. Small wonder, then, that by the end of the story, impotence has been added to his list of worries.

If other characters are more preoccupied with delving beneath the surface, it doesn't always do them much good, because Murakami's point is that such a lack of fascination is systemic and endemic; only a massive shock might be able to dislodge it. A thyroid specialist in the throes of a sweaty menopause travels to Bangkok for a conference, and afterwards treats herself to a holiday in a luxury resort, where darkness impinges periodically on her insistent fantasies of what might have happened to an unnamed enemy from Kobe. An unsought meeting with a spirit doctor provides the possibility of release, but even then she seeks to neutralise the epiphanic with rational language. "If you put those feelings into words," counsels her discreet guide, "they will turn into lies."

Elsewhere, a confused young man experiences a similarly life-altering moment, realising that in the "ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing", lies something vital, that "these, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth".

But if the seismic, real-life event that provoked After the Quake smacks of portentousness, Murakami hasn't abandoned the inspired surrealism that marked out novels like A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as feats of inventive comic genius. Where else could you read of a giant frog persuading a mundane bank clerk to engage an evil subterranean worm in mortal combat, and take it seriously? Who else might allow their frog to quote Hemingway and Dostoevsky and to deliver sentences like "I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog"?

In the ruins of Kobe, as in the sarin gas attacks that he surveyed in his non-fiction work Underground , Murakami detects a "world devoid of light", a narrative arena where "meaning itself broke down". In these dazzlingly elegant stories, he restores some of the light and some of the meaning, arguing that the possibility of moments of optimism and connection is not something we should take for granted. Even Junpei, his pessimistic and passive short-story writer, dares to hope and plans a change of artistic direction: "I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end," he tells us, "who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love." In a world where even the ground beneath our feet can't be relied on, imagination becomes less of a luxury and more of a duty. It's an obligation that Murakami is busily making his raison d'être, to our very great advantage.

"Blind Willow" closes out the Murakami book fair in fine fashion. It's a large collection, encompassing stories written between 1981 and 2005. And it's a uniformly excellent collection as well. In the introduction to the English-language edition, Murakami notes "I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.’ This elegant analogy serves to give the reader some idea of what awaits. As does this review, written by Terrence Rafferty and originally published in the New York Times on Sept. 17, 2006.

In the introduction to “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” Haruki Murakami writes that he considers this book “the first real short story collection” he has published abroad since “The Elephant Vanishes” in the early 1990’s. No, he hasn’t forgotten “After the Quake” (2002), his slim volume of short fiction inspired by the 1995 Kobe earthquake, but that, he says, “was more like a concept album.” So Murakami’s idea of a “real short story collection” is a true miscellany, a grab bag containing prizes of widely variable shape, size and value. Or something--to borrow his own frame of reference--more like one of those overstuffed, career-spanning CD box sets, in which finished, studio-polished work gets tumbled together with demos, alternate versions, remixes, B-sides and stray tracks from obscure tribute albums.

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” doesn’t damage the book in the way it would a collection by, say, William Trevor or Alice Munro, because there’s a fair amount of randomness built right into Murakami’s method--a sense that anything can happen at any time, in the world or on the page, and that the best strategy is just to hang on and see what comes next. As one character in this volume, a female tightrope walker, tells another, a male story writer: “You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does. ... And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.” As a philosophy of life, this may sound a touch banal, but it is precisely the advice that Junpei-- whose art and whose life are both too tightly controlled--needs to hear. And it is also, you can’t help feeling, a bit of wisdom that has enabled Murakami himself to survive and, maybe, deepen as a writer over the two and a half decades of taking things in that this odd, bracing sampler represents.

The 24 stories here include a couple (“A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story” and “New York Mining Disaster”) that were, the author says, among his very first attempts at the short form, and five he wrote only a year ago, which were published in Japan as an independent volume, “Strange Tales From Tokyo,” and which remain together at the end of “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.” (In its original Japanese incarnation, you might say, the wonderful “Strange Tales From Tokyo” could be taken for a concept album; in the context of this larger collection, it’s more like the great climactic medley on “Abbey Road.”) The 19 stories that precede the final five, though, are arranged in a seemingly helter-skelter way: nonchronologically, and without any discernible intent to group them thematically or stylistically. Melancholy, more or less realistic stories like “Hunting Knife” and “Tony Takitani” bump up against goofy little fables like “Dabchick” and “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes,” both of which feature rather unpleasant talking birds. Readers in search of a clear, linear progression--much less a solution to the mystery of Murakami’s art--get no help from the writer himself. They may even find themselves feeling like the Zen detective narrator of one of the “Strange Tales,” who wraps up an unsuccessful (and strikingly desultory) investigation with these words: “I imagine my search will continue — somewhere. A search for something that could very well be shaped like a door. Or maybe something closer to an umbrella, or a doughnut. Or an elephant. A search that, I hope, will take me where I’m likely to find it.”

That’s about as well defined as things get in MurakamiLand, where sudden dislocations of time and space are pretty much the norm, and a certain, let’s say, ontological indeterminacy hangs like a low cloud over everything lived or imagined or dreamed or remembered. “For a few seconds,” says the narrator of the title story, “I stood there in a strange, dim place. Where the things I could see didn’t exist. Where the invisible did.” That place is the site of almost all Murakami’s fiction, from the sprawling novels “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “Kafka on the Shore” to the briefest stories in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”: a terrain that, it seems, even the author is loath to map too precisely. If anything, this new collection has been shaped to keep boundaries as fluid and indistinct as possible — to blur the lines of demarcation between early Murakami and late, between realism and fantasy, between high seriousness and low, slapstick whimsy. (And, for that matter, between stories and novels: two of the best pieces here, “Firefly” and “Man-Eating Cats,” are short stories that grew into the novels “Norwegian Wood” and “Sputnik Sweetheart.”)

There’s no reliable way to get your bearings in Murakami’s world, but if you were to put a gun--or even a reasonably sharp-tipped umbrella--to my head and demand that I name the central concern of this rigorously eccentric writer’s work, I’d say that it is the stubborn elusiveness of the self, the eel-like slipperiness of identity. His stories and novels are full of people, usually young, who feel, as he writes of one character here, as if “his being, his very self, was going to melt away”; or who ask themselves, as another, in a different story, does, “So where is the real me?” and settle, uneasily, for a “fragile, provisional me.” In the most moving stories in this collection--“Chance Traveler” and “Hanalei Bay” are good examples--the point to which the intricate circuitry of Murakami’s narrative ultimately leads is some spark of connection between a past self and the more complex, more confusingly wired version we all seem to end up with. Sometimes the search for that elusive connection is explicit, as it is in the lovely story “A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism,” which, like much of its author’s fiction, is about solitude and the deceptive rigors of youth. That story is set in the period of Murakami’s own coming-of-age, the 60’s, when, he writes, “everything was simple and direct” --unlike the present time, when “if you try to grasp the reality of anything, there’s always a whole slew of convoluted extras that come with it.”

He isn’t always so blunt, but it’s apparent in everything he writes that the project of both his work and his life is the quest for a continuity of self, for a thread that, pulled taut, could put all those “convoluted extras,” along with everything that really matters, on a straight line: a bullet train named Murakami. What he has to guide him is nothing more (or less) than the sound of his own voice, which tells him, and his readers, approximately who he is, for the moment. And over the years he has developed and sustained a remarkably distinctive narrative tone: calm, wry, intimate, gently interrogative. In this English-language volume, he depends, as always, on the kindness of translators, and Philip Gabriel (14 stories) and Jay Rubin (10) serve him expertly here; the tales in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” seem to speak with one, very seductive, voice. That voice, in each of these wildly varied excursions into the strange, dim territory of the self, says that someone named Haruki Murakami is still looking, quixotically, for something less fragile, less provisional than the usual accommodations we make do with on the road. These are just 24 of the places where, one time or another, he thought he might find it.