Haruki Murakami Again

MORE ON HARUKI MURAKAMI’S ‘BLIND WILLOW SLEEPING WOMAN

The hardcover copy of Haruki Murakami’s ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ that I found last Sunday at Abids has twenty five short stories translated into English from the original Japanese versions. The translations were made by two different people- Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin. Philip Gabriel has translated most of the stories.

I read the title story- Blind Willow Sleeping Woman which is about a twenty five year old young man and his hearing impaired cousin who takes him to a hospital. It is a surrealistic story with its own moments of subtle humor. A girl spins a story about flies that carry pollen from the flowers of a blind willow tree and enter the ear of a woman and put her to sleep. This was the first Murakami story I read and I was enchanted.

I read another story – Crabs- one of the shortest in the collection. It is about a young couple on holiday in Singapore who find a quaint hotel where they eat crabs for dinner during their stay. One night the man throws up his dinner and notices that the his dinner of crabs is filled with worms and decides his life has changed and vows never to eat crabs again, ever.

But the shortest story in the collection, only five pages long, is ‘A Perfect Day for Kangaroos’. It is about a young couple who visit a zoo to watch a young kangaroo born only a month ago. It is simply told with some nice observations ( ‘I’d never once won an argument with a girl.’ or ‘I knew I should have read up on kangaroos in an encyclopedia before we made this little excursion.’) and humor.

Strangely enough, my copy doesn’t have the page where the date of publication and other such details are given. It doesn’t even have the name of the publisher anywhere in the inside pages except on the spine where it is given as ‘Knopf’ and on the back as ‘Borzoi Books’. I found it odd but it doesn’t matter much.

However, the other day I was browsing in ‘Odyssey’ at Punjagutta and almost jumped when I saw a paperback copy of the same book but by a different publisher. I turned around the book eagerly to find out its price printed at the back. It was Rs 249/- and I had got a hardcover copy for only Rs. 30.