Once upon a time, on the banks of a Japanese river, a Buddhist sage named Gyogi was addressing a crowd of followers. As he was speaking, his gaze suddenly became fixed on one of his listeners—a famished woman holding a healthy-looking baby. Raising his voice and holding out a bony finger, Gyogi proclaimed the child to be a demon and ordered its mother to drown it. Since the unconvinced woman held on to her child, he recounted the paths of its reincarnations, tracing its soul back to the woman's deceased enemy. Persuaded by this account, the woman threw the baby into the river. She then saw it morph into an atrocious monster that cursed the sage and herself for having discovered its secret. Between the words of Gyogi and the faith of his follower, a legendary miracle was born.

Transmitting his words through more advanced media—and making them considerably less murky—Haruki Murakami consciously attempts to revive a mode of reader-narrative interaction that harks back to such fabled reality-changing predecessors, (as described in Kyoto Motomochi Nakamura's Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition ). His recent collection of twenty-four short stories, many of which had not been previously published in English or have been considerably revised since their last publication, showcases well the various aspects of its author's fascination with storytelling. Written at different periods of his life, the stories included in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman range from political allegories to budding versions of some of his later novels ("Firefly," for instance, is very much like Norwegian Wood ) - all of them sharing the particular fusion of fantasy and realism for which Murakami is famous. Consciously quirky and provocative, the stories play out the tensions between the storyteller and his audience, the narrative as an object of art and a part of everyday reality, in a way which is both pleasurable and intellectually engaging.

Evoking a strong connection with oral literature and the communicative function of art, Murakami takes care to embed his stories within a definite social role and setting - placing himself as a performer or interlocutor speaking to a particular audience. Almost constantly accompanied by a self-analyzing first-person narrator or at least one writer/listener figure, we are reminded of the frequent use we make of more or less elaborate compositions in everyday conversations: to explain one's particularly bad mood; to amuse an acquaintance; to reject a lover. As the characters give musical performances, recount fantastic fairy tales, recite poems or moral parables, the reader is made privy not only to the independent value of their creations but also to their effect on a specific interaction. This connection between art and forming or dissolving social bonds is not broken by even the most fantastic turns a narrative might take. In an extreme illustration, one of the stories has the reminiscence of a poor aunt take physical shape and become permanently glued to an artist's back for anyone to marvel at. The constant comments and conversations the aunt-hump provokes concern not so much on the oddity of this new appendage as its similarity to his interlocutors' friends and memories, becoming a tool of social bonding just as it allows the artist to explore an aesthetic problem:

"Must have been 1950, first year of the Korean War," he said, using a thick towel to wipe the sweat from his face. "I had her two years in a row. It's like old times seeing her again. Not that I missed her, exactly. I'd kind of forgotten that she even existed."

As he thus defines himself as an active participant of everyday social interactions, Murakami underlines that the origins of any story lie precisely in those ongoing conversations—the passage from interlocutor to storyteller to prophet being far more fluid than one would suppose. Just as the legendary Buddhist monk encircled a baby with an increasingly elevated narrative, Murakami's metatextual stories explore the manner in which bits of commonplace language or daily habits are singled out for admiration and suddenly recognized as independent artistic creations. An unconsciously repeated phrase is elevated to the status of a poem, transforming the character's entire mode of speech into verse:

He tried out the words in rhythm: "I talk to myself/ Almost as if/ I were reciting/ Po-e-try."

In another story, a seemingly nonsensical statement gradually becomes prophetic, allowing a realist narrative to fade seamlessly into an eerie Freudian fantasy featuring a talking monkey. A series of stories are driven by the underlying meanings of literalized idioms and wordplay, taking the reader to the South Pole with a lover who is as cold as ice. In another frequently used device, regularly repeated habits effortlessly become infused with mythical and ritual meaning. Thus, in "Tony Takitani", a prodigious collection of female clothing gains the imposing magical status of Ali Baba's treasure trove; in "The Year of Spaghetti", a lonely man's fixation on Italian cuisine becomes a semi-mythical definition of his solitude.

Still, Murakami's adroit maneuvering between the everyday and the artistic is not as authoritarian and uniformly optimistic as such a cursory glance at his plots may suggest. Peopled with storytellers and artists of varying expertise, the pieces forming Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman also emphasize the crucial role of the listener in recognizing—or rejecting—the speaker's statements. Had the woman not thrown the demon into the water—and had the story not been proven true—the narrative spun by Gyogi would never have become a legend. If he fails to affect his audience, the artist fails to link his creation with reality; as Murakami suggests, this leaves him trapped in a frighteningly alien, self-defeating formal structure. In one of his more haunting stories, the protagonist finds that his interlocutor is only a double of himself—and is frightened both by how much they know about each other and how much his mirror self cannot or will not disclose. In another, a Kafkaesque narrator forces his way through a parody of the infamous guarded door by citing an obscure word—but what greets him when the door is opened is only the clutter of sounds he came up with. These startling breakdowns in communication, also shown in comic quid pro quos or symbolized by mysterious bouts of vomiting, are treated as integral to the linguistic exchanges his characters undertake. Blamed upon no one and connected to sicknesses which cannot always be cured, they constitute one of the more pessimistic undertones of Murakami's frequently amusing stories.

By thus exploring the various connections of the narrative to its writer's and reader's reality, Murakami sets his stories on the threshold between the lived and the imaginary, the idiosyncratic and the commonplace. As an alternative to reality, dreams and stories help their creator maintain and define his sense of self; still, once they are no longer checked by anyone, they threaten to destroy this very individuality by making the world seem one idiosyncratic delusion. In and of itself, Murakami suggests, a single speaker's language is hollow. It is only by transmitting his message to someone else that he can rediscover a meaning behind the words he uses; reaffirming himself but also placing himself at the mercy of a stranger.

As a result of this tension, Murakami's stories feel both skillful and self-conscious; engaging the reader in what is a set of enjoyable narratives but also a bolder, more overarching self-exploration. While attempting to charm his reader, his narrator constantly underlines the fragility of his creations and reaches out to us to make sure if his words are being understood. Indeed, although such narrative uncertainty and the metaphoric jumps it involves may take some time to get used to, as one engages more and more in the conversation Murakami proposes the stories become increasingly rewarding. Due to their irreverent mixture of genres and conventions, they may lack the seamlessness of well-executed realism; still, their oddness is not without elegance. Openly testing the rapidity and sensitivity of our reactions, they heighten our amazement at each successful turn of phrase—and make us stop and think about just how we registered it.

 

Marta Figlerowicz wishes she had a Freudian monkey