John Freeman

Three years ago there was a tiny revolution in the world of short-story writing. It was a small-stakes putsch, sure, but for those who flip eagerly to the fiction pages of The New Yorker or Harper's it was an event. In an issue of McSweeney's, Michael Chabon called out writers for penning boring stories, and he was presenting an alternative. Chabon had asked twenty contributors to write thrilling tales in which something happened, mysteries abounded. Not all the stories to come from this call to arms worked--but a few of them did, and they reminded how much more short stories could be if they were unshackled from literary pretensions.

The only problem with Chabon's literary intervention, however, was that there was one writer who could be all these things--thrilling, funny, sad, moving, scary--all at once: Haruki Murakami. Since 1980, the year he wrote his first short story, the Japanese writer has been a walking definition of genius: his work is magical because it's almost impossible to explain how he does it. Why is a short story about a man obsessed with a human-sized frog not just funny, but poignant too? How does he make a tale of cooking only spaghetti for a year sound so eerie and otherworldly? Is there any other writer who can make a yarn about a man who sees a ghost feel so true to life?

"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" is Murakami's latest collection, and it gathers stories from the last two decades of his story-writing career. In an introduction the author remarks that the first one was written in the early eighties, and the last group were written in a five-week blitz in 2005 and published that same year in Japan as "Five Strange Tales from Tokyo." In between, he has pilfered a story or two from other books, and includes five short pieces of "flash fiction." The resulting book should feel like a grab bag, but instead shines as a virtuosic demonstration of Murakami's incredible range.

"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Twenty-Five Stories"

By Haruki Murakami

Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 323 pages

(2006-08-29)

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