Haruki Murakami has won the world’s richest short story prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Harvill Secker), his third collection published in English.
Best known for his novels — among them Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka on the Shore — the Japanese writer has also been lauded for his two previous short story collections The Elephant Vanishes and after the quake. (Although Murakami says the latter “really wasn’t a short-story collection”.)
Murakami’s success in English owes much to his long time translators, Jay Rubin, Professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University, and Philip Gabriel, Professor of Japanese Literature at Arizona University. They worked together on the O’Connor-winning collection. Rubin accepted the â,¬35 000 prize in Murakami’s absence from the award ceremony at the Millennium Hall in Cork, Ireland, last week. Fittingly, Murakami and his translators will share the money.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is both a reader’s and a writer’s delight.
Murakami’s exploration of the unease, disquiet and fear at the heart of everyday existence has perhaps never been more pronounced than in these 25 stories. In the introduction to this English edition, Murakami is candid about his work and confessional about why he writes short stories.
Sensory deprivation, the inability truly to apprehend what is around us, and what critical moments in life portend, are central to Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman‘s title story. Then, in Birthday Girl, Murakami offers a reflection on wishes fulfilled, in a magical and quietly menacing tale of an unforgettable birthday “present”.
A master of the liminal, Murakami examines thresholds crossed and uncrossed in A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism and the lunar transformations (or not) of Man-eating Cats.
The volume’s last five stories, published in Japanese as Tokyo Kitanshu (Strange Tales from Tokyo), are marvellous examples of the Japanese preternatural genre. Hanalei Bay is a superb ghost story, a 21st century equivalent of the 18th century Japanese writer Akinari Ueda’s classic supernatural tales.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is available in South Africa