Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush, famously Delphic in conversation, gave nothing away. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘it’s about Mrs Bartolozzi.’ For some reason I thought about this exchange while working my way through Haruki Murakami’s bumper selection of short stories.
A representative offering from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a career showcase going back to the early 1980s, might be ‘New York Mining Disaster’. Is it about a mining disaster? Well, no. A man’s friends keep unexpectedly dying, all under the age of 30. Happily, he has another friend who owns a black suit, tie and shoes which can be worn at their funerals. Thinking that he looks depressed, on returning from one of these excursions, the friend opens champagne. ‘The only good part is the moment when you pop the cork,’ he pronounces.
Later our man attends a New Year’s Eve party at a local bar. Here he meets a woman who greets him as the exact double of another man, dead these five years, whom she murdered by pushing into a beehive. They chat desultorily for a while (‘Do you ever think about freedom?’ she asked. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’) before saying goodbye. A brief coda swoops in on a band of coalminers, trapped underground and straining to hear the sound of the approaching pickaxes that will guarantee their rescue. ‘It was like a scene from a movie,’ Murakami signs off.
There is a whole lot more where this came from: a series of stories which, without ever quite duplicating their procedural patterns, end up reaching entirely different destinies from the paths first suggested, coming to rest at some mystifyingly oblique angle to what the reader imagined to be their authenticating theme. In ‘Crabs’ a holidaying couple gorge themselves repeatedly on crab-meat at an out-of-the-way restaurant. On the final night of their stay the man vomits convulsively while the woman sleeps seraphically on. ‘He no longer had the faintest clue where his life was headed, or what might be waiting for him.’ In ‘The Year of Spaghetti’ a self-absorbed loner cooks endless dishes of pasta for himself ‘as if it were an act of revenge’. How astonished the Italians would be, he reflects, to know that they were really exporting loneliness.
‘Tony Takitani’, a piece about the illustrator-son of a jazz musician, looks as if it might be halfway realistic. But no, in a trice Tony’s wife is dead in a car smash and the widower in hot pursuit of an assistant to wear her vast collection of designer dresses.
The safe critical garnish in these circumstances is ‘fabular’, the presumption being that left-field kookiness of this sort must be some kind of metaphor for a psychological state or an emotional crisis. As with Kate Bush and Mrs Bartolozzi, though, I ended up thinking — in defiance of most modern critical prescriptions — that ‘The Year of Spaghetti’ is simply a story about a man who cooks spaghetti. The effect is by turns exhilarating and, on the occasions when stylisation sets in, faintly dull.