Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

To put it in the simplest possible terms, I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

Since my debut as a fiction writer in 1979 Ive fairly consistently alternated between writing novels and short stories. My patterns been this: once I finish a novel, I find I want to write some short stories; once a group of stories is done, then I feel like focusing on a novel. I never write any short stories while Im writing a novel, and never write a novel while Im working on short stories. The two types of writing may very well engage different parts of the brain, and it takes some time to get off one track and switch to the other.

It was only after I began my career with two short novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, that I started, from 1980 to 1981, to write short stories. The first three I ever wrote were A Slow Boat to China, A Poor Aunt Story, and New York Mining Disaster. I knew little about short story writing then so it was rough going, but I did find the experience very memorable. I felt the possibilities of my fictional world expand by several degrees. And readers seemed to appreciate this other side of me as a writer. A Slow Boat to China was collected in my first English short story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, while the other two can be found in the present collection. This was my starting point as a short story writer, and also when I developed my system of alternating between novels and short stories.

The Mirror, A Perfect Day for Kangaroos, Dabchick, The Year of Spaghetti, and The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes were all in a collection of short shorts I wrote from 1981 to 1982. The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes, as readers can easily see, reveals my impressions of the literary world at the time of my debut, in the form of a fable. At the time, I couldnt fit in well with the Japanese literary establishment, a situation that continues to the present day.

One of the joys of writing short stories is that they dont 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). Its not like the total physical and mental commitment you have to make for the year or two it takes to compose a novel. You merely enter a room, finish your work, and exit. Thats it. For me, at least, writing a novel can seem to drag on forever, and I sometimes wonder if Im going to survive. So I find writing short stories a necessary change of pace.

One more nice thing about short stories is that you can create a story out of the smallest detailsan idea that springs up in your mind, a word, an image, whatever. In most cases its like jazz improvisation, with the story taking me where it wants to. And another good point is that with short stories you dont have to worry about failing. If the idea doesnt work out the way you hoped it would, you just shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that they cant all be winners. Even with masters of the genre like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carvereven Anton Chekhovnot every short story is a masterpiece. I find this a great comfort. You can learn from your mistakes (in other words, those you cant call a complete success) and use that in the next story you write. In my case, when I write novels I try very hard to learn from the successes and failures I experience in writing short stories. In that sense, the short story is a kind of experimental laboratory for me as a novelist. Its hard to experiment the way I like inside the framework of a novel, so without short stories I know Id find the task of writing novels even more difficult and demanding.

Essentially I consider myself a novelist, but a lot of people tell me they prefer my short stories to my novels. That doesnt bother me, and I dont try to convince them otherwise. Im actually happy to hear them say that. My short stories are like soft shadows Ive set out in the world, faint footprints Ive left behind. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart, and it makes me happy as a writer to be able to share these intimate feelings with my readers.

The Elephant Vanishes came out in 1991 and was subsequently translated into many other languages. Another collection in English, after the quake, was published in 2002 (2000 in Japan). This book contained six short tales all dealing in one way or another with the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Id written it in the hope that all six stories would form a unified image in the readers mind, so it was more like a concept album than a short story collection. In that sense, then, the present book, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is the first real short story collection Ive brought out abroad in a long time.

This book naturally contains some stories I wrote after The Elephant Vanishes appeared. Birthday Girl, Man-Eating Cats, The Seventh Man, and Ice Man are some of these. I wrote Birthday Girl at the request of the editor when I was working on an anthology of other writers stories on the theme of birthdays. It helps to be a writer when youre selecting stories for an anthology, since if youre short one story you can write one yourself. Ice Man, by the way, is based on a dream my wife had, while The Seventh Man is based on an idea that came to me when I was into surfing and was gazing out at the waves.

To tell the truth, though, from the beginning of 1990 to the beginning of 2000 I wrote very few short stories. It wasnt that Id lost interest in short stories. I was just so involved in writing a number of novels that I couldnt spare the time. I didnt have the time to switch tracks. I did write a short story from time to time when I had to, but I never focused on them. Instead, I wrote novels: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; South of the Border, West of the Sun; Sputnik Sweetheart; Kafka on the Shore. And in between, I wrote nonfiction, the two works that make up the English version of Underground. Each of these took an enormous amount of time and energy. I suppose that back then my main battleground was thisthe writing of one novel after another. Perhaps it was just that time of life for me. In between, like an intermezzo, was the collection after the quake, but as I said, this really wasnt a short story collection.

In 2005, though, for the first time in a long time I was struck by a strong desire to write a series of short stories. A powerful urge took hold of me, you might say. So I sat down at my desk, wrote about a story a week, and finished five in not much more than a month. I frankly couldnt think of anything else but these stories, and I wrote them almost without stopping. These five stories, published recently in Japan in a volume entitled Tokyo Kitanshu (Strange Tales from Tokyo) are collected at the end of this book. Although they all share the theme of being strange tales, each story can be read independently, and they dont form a clear-cut, single unit as did the stories in