Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
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 I’ve fairly consistently alternated between writing novels and short stories. My pattern’s 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 I’m writing a novel, and never write a novel while I’m 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 couldn’t 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 don’t 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). It’s 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. That’s it. For me, at least, writing a novel can seem to drag on forever, and I sometimes wonder if I’m 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 details—an idea that springs up in your mind, a word, an image, whatever. In most cases it’s like jazz improvisation, with the story taking me where it wants to. And another good point is that with short stories you don’t have to worry about failing. If the idea doesn’t work out the way you hoped it would, you just shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that they can’t all be winners. Even with masters of the genre like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver—even Anton Chekhov—not every short story is a masterpiece. I find this a great comfort. You can learn from your mistakes (in other words, those you can’t 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. It’s hard to experiment the way I like inside the framework of a novel, so without short stories I know I’d 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 doesn’t bother me, and I don’t try to convince them otherwise. I’m actually happy to hear them say that. My short stories are like soft shadows I’ve set out in the world, faint footprints I’ve 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. I’d written it in the hope that all six stories would form a unified image in the reader’s 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 I’ve 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 you’re selecting stories for an anthology, since if you’re 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 wasn’t that I’d lost interest in short stories. I was just so involved in writing a number of novels that I couldn’t spare the time. I didn’t 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 this—the 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 wasn’t 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 couldn’t 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 don’t form a clear-cut, single unit as did the stories in after the quake. Come to think of it, however, everything I write is, more or less, a strange tale.
“Crabs,” “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” “Hunting Knife,” and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” have all been greatly revised prior to their translation, so the versions here differ significantly from the first versions published in Japan. With some of the other older stories, too, I found spots I wasn’t pleased with and made some minor changes.
I should also mention that many times I’ve rewritten short stories and incorporated them into novels, and the present collection contains several of these prototypes. “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” (included in The Elephant Vanishes) became the model for the opening section of the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and likewise both “Firefly” and “Man-Eating Cats,” with some changes, were incorporated as parts of, respectively, the novels Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart. There was a period when narratives I’d written as short stories, after I’d published them, kept expanding in my mind, developing into novels. A short story I’d written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake, and shout, “Hey, this is no time to be sleeping! You can’t forget about me, there’s still more to write!” Impelled by that voice, I’d find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect up inside me in a very natural, organic way.
Many people have encouraged me and led me to write short stories. Every time I see Amanda Urban, my agent at ICM, she repeats this mantra-like exhortation: “Haruki, write more short stories!” Gary Fisketjon at Knopf, editor of The Elephant Vanishes, also edited the present collection and was pivotal in seeing Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman into print. Both Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, my hardworking, skilled translators, have their own unique touch, and it’s been a real pleasure to read my stories again in their superb translations. I’ve also been greatly inspired by Deborah Treisman, and her predecessor, Linda Asher, literary editors at The New Yorker, which has published many of my stories. Thanks to all of them, this new collection of short stories is now published and—as a short story writer—I couldn’t be more pleased with what we’ve accomplished.
—H.M.