title: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Twenty-four Stories
author:  Haruki Murakami 
description: <i>Starred Review.</i> [Signature]<i>Reviewed by</i> Lily Tuck One of my favorite Haruki Murakami stories is "The Elephant Vanishes"part of an earlier collection published in 1991in which the narrator watches as an elephant in a zoo grows smaller and smaller until finally the elephant disappears. No explanation is given, there is no resolution, the vanished elephant remains a mystery at the same time that the narrator's life is changed forever.<i>Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman</i>, Murakami's new collection of 25 stories, many of which have appeared in the <i>New Yorker</i> and other publications, also describes these epiphanic instances. In the title story, a character who is half deaf, alludes to a John Ford movie, <i>Fort Apache</i>, in which John Wayne tells the newly arrived colonel that if he actually saw some Indians on his way to the fort that means there weren't any. Everything is a bit offincluding of course the blind willow trees whose pollen carry flies that burrow inside a sleeping woman's earsas in a dream, where explanations are always lacking but where interpretations are plentiful. In "Mirror," the narrator sees someone who appears to be both himself and not himself in a mirror and then finds out the mirror does not exist; the disaffected womana lot of Murakami's characters are handicapped or incapacitated in some physical wayin "The Shinagawa Monkey," loses her own name; in "Man-Eating Cats," the narrator's girlfriend disappears and as he searches for her finds that "with each step I took, I felt myself sinking deeper into a quicksand where my identity vanished." Murakami's stories are difficult to describe and one should, I think, resist attempts to overanalyze them. Their beauty lies in their ephemeral and incantatory qualities and in his uncanny ability to tap into a sort of collective unconscious. In addition, a part of Murakami's genius is that he uses images as plot points, going from image to image, like in the marvelous story "Airplane," where, while making love, the narrator imagines strings hanging from the ceiling and how each one might open up a different possibilitygood and bad. It is clear that Murakami is well acquainted with the teachings of Buddhism, western philosophies, Jungian theory; he has a deep knowledge of music and, also, I have been told, is a dedicated, strong swimmer. In his stories, he roams freely and convincingly through all these elements (and no doubt many more) without differentiating to create a world where cats talk and elephants disappear. In the introduction to this collection, Murakami writes how, for him, writing a novel is a challenge and how writing short stories is a joythese stories are a joy for his readers as well.<i>Lily Tuck's most recent novel,</i> The News from Paraguay<i>, won the 2004 National Book Award.</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Contents
  
  Part One: _Mulberry Farm_
  
  1
  
  2
  
  3
  
  4
  
  Part Two: _The Grand Spa Hotel Elise_
  
  5
  
  6
  
  7
  
  Part Three: _The Strait_
  
  8
  
  9
  
  10
  
  11
  
  12
  
  13
  
  He was three, maybe four years old. He sat quietly on a small synthetic
  leather armchair, chin bent over his green T-shirt, jeans turned up over his
  trainers. In one hand he held a wooden train which hung down between his legs
  like a rosary.
  
  On the other side of the room the woman lying on the bed might have been
  anywhere between thirty and forty. Her arm, covered with red blotches and dark
  scabs, was attached to an empty drip. The virus had reduced her to a panting
  skeleton covered with lumpy dry skin, but it hadn’t succeeded in robbing her
  of all her beauty, which showed in the form of her cheekbones and her turned-
  up nose.
  
  The little boy raised his head and looked at her, grasped one arm of the
  chair, climbed down and walked over to the bed with the train in his hand.
  
  She didn’t notice him. Her eyes, sunken in two dark wells, stared at 