Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Murakami Haruki (Part 3)

There's a couple of things I want to say about Murakami Haruki.

First, Murakami has a thing for ears, and so I have a thing for Murakami's thing for ears. I only really noticed it while reading A Wild Sheep Chase, in which the narrator turns his girlfriend's ears into something erotic and mysterious. I thought it was weird at the time, and I still sort of do. But, people become attracted to all sorts of things, so why can't perfectly shaped earlobes be one of these things? And who am I to balk against author appeal?

Second, I often find myself wondering if Murakami's works are just varying degrees of semi-autobiographical stories. "Folklore" from part 2, for example, felt very much like the author really was the narrator.Yes, I know that he probably did not work at an elephant factory, or that he really isn't a walking computer, but there is a lot of himself in his writing, which is true for every writer. 'Write what you know' and all that jazz. (Also, you can't tell me that he doesn't have an acting friend whose real name is the same as a Yamonote Line stop, because I won't believe you.)

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Murakami Haruki (Part 2)

I've always thought there's something weird about Murakami's Vintage covers. The US releases are these blocky, colorful things with close-ups of people's faces. (The one for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman even features an ear.)

The version I have, however, is the UK version, which has a minimalistic, Japonisme-style cover. Almost all their covers, with the exception of After Dark, are simple and mostly-white. If the American releases invoke the strangeness of his stories, the British versions invoke the quiet, simple way he writes.

Now that I've said my peace, let's look at the next three stories in Blind Willow, "Aeroplane", "The Mirror", and "A Folklore for My Generation". All three of these stories involve a man recollecting an event from his youth. Only "The Mirror" has nothing to do with women. And none of them mentions the ear, which makes me very sad.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Murakami Haruki (Part 1)

You might not agree, but I'm a pretty smart person. I'm also a really shallow person. I can't really think too deeply about anything, mostly because it gives me a headache. (And yet, I'm going to try to be deeply analytical tonight.)

I am also a fan of Haruki Murakami. His writing style is very simple, and his stories always seem to be about isolation and loneliness. He usually writes about the here and now, but there's a surreal quality to his world that causes the extra-ordinary to occur. And when the places aren't real at all, like in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, there's a dull normality to it all that makes the surreal ordinary.

However much I love his stories, there have been times when I had been Murakami'ed out. I happened after reading a slew of his novels, particularly Dance Dance Dance, It happened a second time after I tried to tackle his short-story collection Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow almost immediately after reading Kafka on the Shore and After Dark. I ended up reading about three-fourths of the collection before throwing it on my reading pile. I can only take some much surreal stories about making connections with other people.

But, I pulled Blind Woman out of the pile and started re-reading it the other day. Let's see how much Murakami I can take this time around.