Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

یه مجموعه داستان کوتاه که همونم به طور کامل ترجمه نشده.
مثل اینکه کتاب اصلی ۲۴ تا داستان داره ولی اینی که ترجمه شده شامل ۷ تا داستان میشه.
راستش من با هیچکدوم از داستان‌هاش خیلی حال نکردم
برای یه بار خوندن بد نبود :)

E c'è ancora gente che quando vuole evadere guarda la Tv

Per questa volta eviterò di annoiarvi con le mie solite manifestazioni stucchevoli di cieco amore nei confronti di Haruki.

Vi lascerò soltanto una profondissima perla di saggezza che ho maturato nella mia innata modestia a fine lettura. ù_ù

Murakami sta al lettore come una donna di vent'anni sta a un suo coetaneo maschio (e sottolineo coetaneo).

Ossia: la donna a parità di condizioni afferra e vede cose che l'uomo può appena intravedere solo con l'aiuto di un corso intensivo trimestrale più CD-ROM esplicativo.

In altre parole.. è inutile:
la donna sta avanti.
Murakami pure.

Il lettore non può far altro che seguire docilmente la penna di Haruki, ed aprire occhi ed orecchie ad universi altrimenti imperscrutabili.

P.S. Chi non ha letto Norwegian wood, salti a piè pari il diciannovesimo racconto “La lucciola”. E' praticamente il riassunto.

I super love this book! It was like eating a pack of chocolates with different flavors but all are good. I think I like most of the stories here, can't really pick any that I dislike.

The collection consist of wide range of characters, background, scenery with different sort of mystery and bizarre incidents. I see cats, some supernatural powers, vanishing stuff and human like usual, but it was written in a very different mood that I really love how it all goes.

My most favorite would be Birthday Girl, Dabchick, The Year of Spaghetti and Where I'm Likely To Find It. I love Firefly as well, for the Norwegian Wood vibe on it. The Mirror a bit spooky but I love how the narrator tells the story and Aeroplane : Or, How He Talked to Himself as If Reciting Poetry also another favorite-- kind of surreal but a bit sweetness and memorable. Nausea 1979 was very mysterious, and I feel bad for the guy actually. Hanalei Bay was lovely as well-- how the reality bites.

A great book. If you are new to Murakami, this is a good book for a start. All his style of writing written in here. You'll get the picture of his magical realism and what's going on inside his head, probably.

Subtle twists and strangely lovely. One of my favorite now!

" في ذلك الوقت لم يكن بمستطاعي أن أفسر أي شيء لأي أحد ، شعرت وكأنني على وشك الانزلاق عن وجه الأرض . أردت منكِ أن تفهميني فحسب ، وتضمّيني إليكِ ، دون أي منطق أو تفسيرات ."

Eén verhaal herkende ik uit de film, dat was een opvallende ervaring. Ergens las ik dat twee van de zes verhalen uit de film 'Blind willow, sleeping woman' uit deze verhalenbundel komen.

Deze bundel bevat typische Murakami-verhalen, met surrealistische elementen zoals een vreemde telefoontjes en een pratende aap. Hij geeft aandacht aan details, soms in mooie zinnen. Hij weet te boeien en dat is knap gedaan.

Instead of planting a willow tree in the yard in honor of our ninth ("willow") anniversary, wife brought this book into my life at the right time, or so it seems, since it felt right to return to Murakami after many years away. I've only read The Elephant Vanishes (circa 1997), After the Quake (circa 2003), and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (in 2008) -- I've always liked him but apparently not well enough to read another Murakami book in the past 12 years. Also, importantly, for years the paperback versions of the novels I saw in stores and the copy of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle I own (a gift received somehow more than 15 years ago now) all had really small print and nonexistent margins. Before I started wearing reading glasses (1.5X magnification) it seemed too difficult to run my eyes across the page of a Murakami book for an extended time. The problem wasn't Murakami's writing, of course, which is straightforward, easy, conversational but not voice-driven, "balanced" as it's described in one of the better stories in this collection ("The Kidney-Shaped Stone"). My failure to read his novels, the names of which have all been familiar to me for years, was mainly the fault of those paperbacks with small print and stingy margins.

Generally, I enjoyed reading this perfectly formatted paperback collection, in part because I haven't read a story collection in a while. I liked the sequencing, anticipating that they'd put the good stories up front, followed by the lesser, weaker ones, and then it'd get better throughout, with the best stories toward the end. The collection seemed sequenced exactly like that, with the more fragmentary or shorter pieces filling out the second quarter being hit or miss, although one of the very few stories that seemed excellent throughout and nailed the ending was one of these shorter ones ("The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes"), with a metafictional allegorical vibe.

If I had to name favorites (<--that seems like a representative Murakami-type phrase) I'd probably say that I preferred "Birthday Girl," "Hunting Knife," "Man-eating Cats," "The Seventh Man," "Tony Takitani," "Chance Traveler," and particularly "Hanalei Bay," which apparently was made into a movie although unavailable to stream.

At their best these stories present a sort of enlightened mediocrity, settling in at an aesthetic midpoint, thereby steadying readers, allowing unreal or the otherworldly or fantastic or unusual elements to emerge without it seeming unnerving or silly or forced (as in that last story with the monkey), similar in this way to Kafka (steady tone and a single unreal element of intrigue) yet unlike magical realism since the prose is never ornate, florid, indulgent, artsy, kinetic, energetic, surprising, self-conscious.

In no way does Murakami capitalize on Japanese particularities -- instead his characters seem to live in a world of American exports, jazz of course throughout, and other international brands, like New Balance, reading Dickens, rarely mentioning Japanese products and food, certainly never emphasizing them.

What it seems like Murakami does best is lead the reader along, introduce an element of intrigue, a little mystery, something unknown or withheld, that gets the pages flowing ahead so characters' histories and minor pathologies can emerge, as well as maybe a few realizations about the nature of humanity/existence, before the intrigue resolves, never ingeniously (no a-ha! conclusions), usually organically, naturally, simply, almost like a dissipation just short of disapointing, often ending with a two-line summary or finisher like a moral, not quite condensed and definitive, after a white space.

The resolution of the plot, the story's point, is the mystery, the intrigue, leading the reader along in a way that pleasurably passes the time, maybe with a bit of instruction here and there, something that may or may not strike readers in such a way to evoke something similar from their lives.

A generous four stars for this collection -- I plan to read a lot more Murakami in 2021, in part because the margins and print size in these Vintage International paperbacks with the pastel geometric covers seem just about right, and I feel like it'll be worthwhile, without expectations of towering literary artistry-type reading experiences but something valuable to discover in terms of novel construction, or at worst I expect they'll be pleasant ways to pass the time, to wile away the final months of the pandemic (let's hope), the literary equivalent of taking in a baseball game on a summer afternoon (Murakami decided to start writing while lounging in the outfield stands at a baseball game -- the crack of the bat made him think "I'll be a writer.")

با تشکر از مترجم که به لطفش یاد گرفتیم
Woman
یعنی دختر
:))))))))

چاپ پنجم 11/93