“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” is the last book I read from Haruki Murakami, my favorite writer. “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” its a compilation of short histories that he wrote since 1980 till nowadays. Reading this book you’ll get a sense of Haruki’s trajectory and style changes through time. Some of the short histories included in this book were used later to create full size novels like Norwegian Wood.
Some paragraphs extracted from the book that I liked:
“Do you like music?” she asked me.
“I do if it´s nice music in a nice world”, I said.
“In a nice world there is no nice music”, she said, as if revealing some deep secret. “In a nice world the air doesn´t vibrate”.
She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, ‘I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is guess from waht comes floating to the surface every once in a while.’
Haruki Murakami can be considered one of the most internationalized Japaneses writers and is one of the best japanese candidades for next Nobel Prize contest. Next Haruki’s book After Dark can be pre-ordered from Amazon, and will be on sale sometime this year.
3 replies on “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”
Thanks for the post, Kirai.
I’ve only read Norwegian Wood from Murakami, but his is an author that definitely worths it.
He’s been mostly compared with Kafka who he loves most.
The fact that he studied literature, run a jazz club for many years and was rised in Kyoto were things that catchs your eye.
[…] In the Japanese world Geishas are Iki. They are beautiful, sophisticated but the don’t have the intention to stand out. Japanese architecture is Iki, houses with tatamis are Iki, Haruki Murakami’s novels are Iki, eating sushi is Iki, ukiyo-e is Iki… If we get in contact with any of those we will arrive to a similar mental state. […]
just came across this post. it’s pretty old. I’d just like to say thank you for showing me it.