Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Title Previously published in English in Year written ( published )
Blind Willow , Sleeping Woman Harper 's [ 1983 ] 1995
Birthday Girl Harper 's and Birthday Stories 2002
New York Mining Disaster 1980 / 1981
Airplane : Or , How He Talked to Himself as If Reciting Poetry The New Yorker [ 1987 ] 1989
The Mirror 1981 / 1982 , ( 1983 )
A Folklore for My Generation : A Prehistory of Late-Stage Capitalism The New Yorker 1989
Hunting Knife The New Yorker 1984
A Perfect Day for Kangaroos 1981
Dabchick McSweeney 's 1981
Man-Eating Cats The New Yorker 1991
A 'Poor Aunt ' Story The New Yorker 1980
Nausea 1979 1984
The Seventh Man Granta 1996
The Year of Spaghetti The New Yorker 1981
Tony Takitani The New Yorker 1990
The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes 1981 / 1982 , ( 1983 )
The Ice Man The New Yorker 1991
Crabs Stories # 50 1984 , 2003
Firefly ( later reused within Norwegian Wood ) 1983
Chance Traveller Harper 's 2005
Contents
Many of the stories in the collection have been published previously in Japanese periodicals ( not listed here ) , then translated in literary magazines ( mentioned below ) , although some have been revised for Blind Willow . The stories are listed below in the order in which they appear in the book . Many of the stories are translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin .
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (めくらやなぎと眠る女, Mekurayanagi to nemuru onna) is a collection of 24 short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The stories contained in the book were written between 1980 and 2005, and published in Japan in various magazines and collections. The contents of this compilation was selected by Murakami and first published in English translation in 2006 (its Japanese counterpart was released later in 2009). Around half the stories were translated by Philip Gabriel with the other half being translated by Jay Rubin. In this collection, the stories alternate between the two translators for the most part. Murakami considers this to be his first real English-language collection of short stories since The Elephant Vanishes (1993) and considers after the quake (2000) to be more akin to a concept album, as its stories were designed to produce a cumulative effect. In the introductory notes to the English-language edition of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Murakami declares, I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.