Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,1

I’d find the task of writing novels even more difficult and demanding.

Essentially I consider myself a novelist, but a lot of people tell me they prefer my short stories to my novels. That doesn’t bother me, and I don’t try to convince them otherwise. I’m actually happy to hear them say that. My short stories are like soft shadows I’ve set out in the world, faint footprints I’ve left behind. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart, and it makes me happy as a writer to be able to share these intimate feelings with my readers.

The Elephant Vanishes came out in 1991 and was subsequently translated into many other languages. Another collection in English, after the quake, was published in 2002 (2000 in Japan). This book contained six short tales all dealing in one way or another with the 1995 Kobe earthquake. I’d written it in the hope that all six stories would form a unified image in the reader’s mind, so it was more like a concept album than a short story collection. In that sense, then, the present book, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is the first real short story collection I’ve brought out abroad in a long time.

This book naturally contains some stories I wrote after The Elephant Vanishes appeared. “Birthday Girl,” “Man-Eating Cats,” “The Seventh Man,” and “Ice Man” are some of these. I wrote “Birthday Girl” at the request of the editor when I was working on an anthology of other writers’ stories on the theme of birthdays. It helps to be a writer when you’re selecting stories for an anthology, since if you’re short one story you can write one yourself. “Ice Man,” by the way, is based on a dream my wife had, while “The Seventh Man” is based on an idea that came to me when I was into surfing and was gazing out at the waves.

To tell the truth, though, from the beginning of 1990 to the beginning of 2000 I wrote very few short stories. It wasn’t that I’d lost interest in short stories. I was just so involved in writing a number of novels that I couldn’t spare the time. I didn’t have the time to switch tracks. I did write a short story from time to time when I had to, but I never focused on them. Instead, I wrote novels: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; South of the Border, West of the Sun; Sputnik Sweetheart; Kafka on the Shore. And in between, I wrote nonfiction, the two works that make up the English version of Underground. Each of these took an enormous amount of time and energy. I suppose that back then my main battleground was this—the writing of one novel after another. Perhaps it was just that time of life for me. In between, like an intermezzo, was the collection after the quake, but as I said, this really wasn’t a short story collection.

In 2005, though, for the first time in a long time I was struck by a strong desire to write a series of short stories. A powerful urge took hold of me, you might say. So I sat down at my desk, wrote about a story a week, and finished five in not much more than a month. I frankly couldn’t think of anything else but these stories, and I wrote them almost without stopping. These five stories, published recently in Japan in a volume entitled Tokyo Kitanshu (Strange Tales from Tokyo) are collected at the end of this book. Although they all share the theme of being strange tales, each story can be read independently, and they don’t form a clear-cut, single unit as did the stories in after the quake. Come to think of it, however, everything I write is, more or less, a strange tale.

“Crabs,” “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story,” “Hunting Knife,” and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” have all been greatly revised prior to their translation, so the versions here differ significantly from the first versions published in Japan. With some of the other older stories, too, I found spots I wasn’t pleased with and made some minor changes.

I should also mention that many times I’ve rewritten short stories and incorporated them into novels, and the present collection contains several of these prototypes. “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” (included in The Elephant Vanishes) became the model for the opening section of