Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
Gods of the Mall
By Christian Caryl
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin
Knopf, 334 pp, $24.95
Like other writers of great ambition, Haruki Murakami has created his own distinctly identifiable world, an imaginary universe that can be found in even the smallest of his works. 'The Year of Spaghetti,' a short tale that originally appeared in The New Yorker a few years back, takes up a mere five pages in his latest story collection, but it is about as concise an introduction to Murakami's cosmos as one could wish. 'In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti,' the anonymous narrator informs us. Those are the horizons of his existence. He doesn't seem to have a job or, for that matter, anything else to occupy him. We never learn how he pays for his pasta or comes up with the rent. If anything, he seems to be hiding from it all. 'As a rule I cooked spaghetti, and ate it, alone. I was convinced that spaghetti was a dish best enjoyed alone. I can't really explain why I felt that way, but there it is.'
Review, 4009 words
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