Blind willow, sleeping woman : twenty-four stories / Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin

Murakami (Kafka on the Shore) is currently the West's most popular Japanese author, and each story in his new collection bears his imprimatur, a matter-of-fact style combined with plausible but surreal premises to produce a dizzying adventure. People lose themselves in mirrors; talking monkeys steal people's names until a clever psychologist solves the problem; a mother loses her only son to a shark attack in Hawaii and then travels to the site of the accident for a vacation every year, where surfers there are able to see his ghost. In the "Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes," Murakami skewers the staid literary establishment, whose members he caricatures as fat, blind crows, unwilling to try anything new. Magical animals and the power of natural disasters sweep through his characters' lives, transforming what came before. Yet people seem to survive, either numbed or strengthened by their ordeals. The wonderful weirdness of his vision and his unique voice are difficult to describe. They must be experienced.