EVEN BY HIS OWN STANDARDS, Haruki Murakami’s last novel, Kafka on the Shore, was particularly disconcert-ing. With its exploration of imperfection and otherness, it appeared guaranteed to put the reader half-a-step out of the rhythms of life as it normally is. But if that was a difficult—but immensely magnetic—book, his latest col-lection of short stories to be made available in English carries a celebratory whiff.

It can’t be otherwise. Murakami opens his introduction to the collection with these words: “To put it in the simplest possible terms, I find novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy.” In the two decades since the pu-blication of The Wild Sheep Chase, the cult of Murakami has acquired vast myths. His devo-tion to Raymond Carver, his jazz, his cats, his restaurant, and his high standards of physical fitness, scaffold his work as fiction apart.

The short stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman relax some of that obsessiveness. Or do they? As he writes: “One of the joys of writ-ing short stories is that they don’t take so long to finish. Generally, it takes me about a week to get a short story into some kind of decent shape (though revisions can be endless). It’s not like the total physical and mental com-mitment you have to make for a year or two it takes to compose a novel.”

The short story is also where Murakami experiments for those novels. They are not necessarily fragments of novels in progress. Take Man-Eating Cats. It reveals some of the puzzles Murakami was trying to solve in Sput-nik Sweetheart. He may have walked away in a week with a fully formed story, but it’s intere-sting to compare the short story and the novel for clues to Murakami’s creative process.

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