Product Description
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Following the bestselling triumph of "Kafka on the Shore," Murakami returns with a collection of stories that generously expresses his masterful fiction-writing skills. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of the human experience. Full description
Reviews:
mackedoodle (United Kingdom) (2008/01/27): Murakami's strength has always been in his charactirisation and the creation of wierd miasma the you are slowly are caught up and immmeressed in. This is unlike Philip K Dick say whos characters are mere archetypes who act as mediums for event and excells in the setting and concept. This means the while Dick's short stories are often better than his novels the reverse is true of Murakami.
There is simply not the space in the short story medium for Murakami's strenghts to develope. While with his novels you emerge from the fog the engulfs with an cleansed feeling, the mental equivilent of climbing out of a hot bath, with the short stories you reach the end with a sense of anticlimax and thinking "is that it". The main problem being in many of the stories that nothing actually happens.
None the less they are still beautifully and lyrically written in the classic Murakami style and the translation is, as always, effortless. The end effect is to make you hunger for his novels all the more.
