BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN
by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Harvill Secker (July 6), £16.99; 334pp

OUTSIDE JAPAN Haruki Murakami is better known for his novels — most recently Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka on the Shore — than his short stories. This is a shame. As Murakami explains in the introduction to this new collection, the two forms complement each other: “If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”

Murakami’s gardens are very strange. In the title story, a young man accompanies his schoolboy cousin to an ear doctor: “I’d never looked at anybody’s ear so intently before. Once you start observing it closely, the human ear — its structure — is a pretty mysterious thing. With all these absurd twists and turns to it, bumps and depressions . . .

Surrounded by this asymmetrical wall, the hole of the ear gapes open like the entrance to a dark, secret cave.”

The cousins set off for hospital on a crowded bus. On it is a group of old people: “It was amazing how much they looked alike. Like a drawer full of samples of something, all neatly lined up.”

The old people are dressed for mountain climbing, but the route does not pass any mountains: “So where in the world could they have been going?” Murakami calmly traces such oddities, which lead, like the whorls of the ear, to the mystery at the centre of his story.

Sometimes he depicts the human heart as a deep black well: “Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”

Elsewhere Murakami plays with the idea that memory is the most mysterious part of our lives. In Hunting Knife, a man in a wheelchair tells a stranger about his recurring dream: “There’s a sharp knife stabbed into the soft part of my head, where the memories lie. It’s stuck deep down inside. It doesn’t hurt or weigh me down it’s just stuck there . . . I can stab myself, but I can’t reach the knife to pull it out.”

A woman who met her husband in a skiing resort narrates The Ice Man. “He was tall, his cheeks were sharply chiselled, like frozen crags, his fingers covered with frost that looked like it would never, ever melt. Other than this, he looked perfectly normal.”

Only in a dream or a Murakami story could a man of ice look normal. It ends with a piercing image of marital loneliness: “My heart is just about gone now . . . I’m completely alone, in the coldest, loneliest place in the world. When I cry, my husband kisses my cheeks, turning my tears to ice. He peels off those frozen tears and puts them on his tongue. You know I love you, he says. And I know it’s true.”

It is disconcerting to learn that Murakami based this story on a dream of his wife’s. He plants this information in his introduction, serene in the face of its strangeness.

Murakami’s prose is praised for its elegance and poise. He associates these qualities with the nature of love in The Kidney-Shaped Stone that Moves Every Day. This is a story about a writer whose father told him: “Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three that have real meaning for him. No more, no less.”

The writer becomes obsessed with how many of the three he has met, and actively avoids “women who seemed as if they might be difficult to get rid of”. He meets his match in a wirewalker who loves nothing more than to be in a high place “just me and the wind”.

From her, he learns that the countdown of significant relationships that his father’s maxim inspired has no meaning: “What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. And it always has to be the first time and the last.”

These stories span 25 years of Murakami’s writing life. He claims: “My short stories are like soft shadows I’ve set out in the world, faint footprints I’ve left behind . . . like guideposts to my heart.” It is indeed an intimate pleasure to read them.

Murakami was born in 1949 and made his debut in 1979. In A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism, he confesses that “there were doors we had to kick in, right in front of us, and you better believe we kicked them in! With Jim Morrison, the Beatles, and Dylan blasting out the soundtrack to our lives.”

That soundtrack, subtly assimilated in late 20th-century Japan, is clearly audible in Murakami’s fiction. With the notable exception of the wirewalker, all the women in this book could be serenaded with Bob Dylan’s cruelly beautiful lyric: “You make love just like a woman . . . But you break just like a little girl.”

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