Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

In the past, I've much preferred Murakami's longer form writing - that is, his novels - to his short stories, and indeed I was almost halfway through this career-spanning collection before I felt myself really respond to anything in it (that said, it finishes on a high - the last four stories are all really good, and there are some others in the second half, including "Tony Takitani", which are touched by that familiar Murakami magic). In general, I think that he's an author who benefits from having some space in which to develop his ideas and worlds - in the briefer medium, his stories tend to come across as a bit obvious and their off-the-wallness not really justified, rather than occupying that happy space between the ordinary and the extraordinary in which his novels seem to dwell. I don't know whether this is a case of me holding an author up to a higher standard than usual because I've so loved his work in the past, or whether it's that very prior familiarity which is causing me to fill in at least some of the gaps in the craft of these stories in order to imbue them with the spirit of which I know he's capable, but in either case the end result is that I was left only partially satisfied by the stories here. That said, of course, he still writes - quite literally - like a dream, and even if I think these are down on his usual standard, I flew through them once I got started.