More than meets the eye — or not

Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush, famously Delphic in conversation, gave nothing away. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘it’s about Mrs Bartolozzi.’ For some reason I thought about this exchange while working my way through Haruki Murakami’s bumper selection of short stories.

A representative offering from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a career showcase going back to the early 1980s, might be ‘New York Mining Disaster’. Is it about a mining disaster? Well, no. A man’s friends keep unexpectedly dying, all under the age of 30. Happily, he has another friend who owns a black suit, tie and shoes which can be worn at their funerals.