A Review of Haruki Murakami’s “First Person Singular”
Fiction or Memoir?
The work of Japanese author Haruki Murakami usually takes one of two modes: either a story or a novel is a tale of the fantastic or it is one of kitchen sink realism. Rarely do the two intermingle. However, in Murakami’s new short story collection, First Person Singular (and all eight of the stories in the collection are written in the first person singular), the two overlap to some degree to create a hybrid, a middle oval in a Venn diagram. Some stories appear to be outright fiction and fabulist, while other stories seem to be based on a real event or events in the author’s life. (One story towards the end of the volume is told strictly from the author’s viewpoint — he is named as the narrator — and seems to be an essay about his fandom of Japanese baseball.) Thus, this begs the question: what is real and what is not?
First Person Singular marks an improvement over Murakami’s last story collection, Men Without Women (first published in English in 2017). I found some of the stories in that tome to be fairly wispy and didn’t captivate my interest at all. In comparison, I read First Person Singular in one sitting of a little less than three hours on an early spring Sunday afternoon. These are stories that are gripping and compelling for the most part — though there is the odd semi-dud sprinkled amongst them, the first story in the collection being one of them (it’s about a chance meeting with an old man with a bizarre take on circles). Despite this, you’ll want to sit on the edge of your seat as you plow through these usually masterful takes on the bizarre and yet seemingly realistic at the same time. There’s no central theme to a lot of these stories. They seem to be meant for the sole purpose of entertaining and entertain they do.
My favourite story in the batch is the one that is also the strangest, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey.” Originally published in the New Yorker, it’s a tale of a traveller to a small mountaintop town in Japan who stays at a rundown inn where he is attended to by a monkey who can speak human. (I nearly said “English,” but, of course, this story and all others were originally written in Japanese.) The monkey reveals that he has been in love with human females and the only way he can act on that love is to steal the name of these women through vaguely complicated means. It’s a springy story that is light in its telling, and it is captivating. No other story in the read is quite like this one, which is why it stands out for me. However, nearly as equally entertaining is “With the Beatles,” another New Yorker tale. (It should be noted here that if you’re looking for the crème of the crop of Murakami’s stories from this collection, you might be best served by looking up past recent issues of the New Yorker.) In that tale, a young man who is to meet with his girlfriend at her home instead runs into her brother, who recounts a very strange condition he has to the young man.
While First Person Singular makes for varied and engrossing reading, not everything is a home run as already indicated. Still, taken as a whole, this is a first-class book about the relationship between the real and the unreal, and the perception of both from a singular author’s voice. For instance, in that “essay” about Japanese baseball, we are to question how much of it is real and how much of it is fiction because it is ostensibly found in a collection of short stories. Murakami notes in the piece that he self-published a book of poetry based on his favourite baseball team in the early ’80s that is now long out-of-print and quite rare (and expensive) to acquire. However, a Google search on the subject didn’t turn up any results (that I could find), leading me to wonder if the previously published poetry angle of the “essay” was real, or if it was a fabrication of the author who is toying with his fans.
Again, First Person Singular is a book that offers a lot of questions as to how much of a story — no matter how fantastic it might be (and I’m not referring to the writing quality of an individual piece) — has an element of truth or autobiography to it. That’s what makes it so readable and engaging, and this was the reason why I had a hard time putting the book down. What’s also appealing is that these stories seem fresh without repetition of Murakami cliches — though this book creates new ones in that the majority of these pieces are set on mountaintops. It doesn’t hurt that the book was originally published in Japanese only last year, and the majority of the English translated stories appeared in magazines in the years 2019 and 2020. (To put that in comparison, there was a three-year lag in between the Japanese publication of Men Without Women and the English version of the same book.) There’s a sense of currency to this affair.
All in all, First Person Singular shows Murakami at the mastery of his powers in the short form narrative and is usually every bit as good as many of his best novels. If you’re new to Murakami or just generally want to know what might make him tick, First Person Singular is an evocative read that will keep you glued to the page. All of the elements of his fiction — from the downright surreal to the hyper-realistic — are present in this book, making it an unforgettable reading experience that feels downright fresh and new. Haruki Murakami is a fabulist writer, and with works such as First Person Singular, he proves that he’s also a fantastic one worth reading. Hand this guy a Nobel Prize for Literature already!
Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular will be published by Knopf Publishing Group on April 6, 2021.
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You may also be interested in the following review: Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
