First Person Singular

Starred review from December 7, 2020
Murakami’s engrossing collection (after the novel Killing Commendatore) offers a crash course in his singular style and vision, blending passion for music and baseball and nostalgia for youth with portrayals of young love and moments of magical realism. The one thing shared by the collection’s eight stories is their use of the first-person-singular voice. Murakami’s gift for evocative, opaque magical realism shines in “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” in which a review of a fictional album breathes new life into the ghost of the jazz great, and “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” wherein a talking monkey ruminates with a traveler on love and belonging. Murakami finds ample material in young love and sex, showcased in “On a Stone Pillow,” in which a young man’s brief tryst with a coworker, unremarkable in itself, takes on a degree of immortality after she mails him her poetry. In “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” the collection’s one nonfiction piece, Murakami recounts how baseball and writing, the twin passions of his youth, grew together in the stadium of his beloved Yakult Swallows. These shimmering stories are testament to Murakami’s talent and enduring creativity.

January 1, 2021
A new collection of stories from the master of the strange, enigmatic twist of plot. "Your brain is made to think about difficult things." So concludes the narrator of "Cream," the first story in this gathering, an allusion to the phrase cr�me de la cr�me and not the English rock band. In that narrator's case, the cream rises when you finally understand something you have not comprehended before, while "the rest is boring and worthless." That realization comes after an old classmate invites him to a piano recital at the vertiginous top of a tall mountain, where he is subjected to both a Christian harangue and a metaphysical puzzle. Music is never far from a Murakami yarn, though always with an unexpected turn: Charlie Parker comes in a dream to tell one young man that death is pretty boring and meaningless, saying, "What's existed until then suddenly and completely vanishes." It's a righteous sentiment, but the young man's moral flaw was not to consider what existed but instead to write a faux record review for a college magazine about a Parker album that never did, one pairing him with Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. When his editor learns the truth and objects to the chicanery, the young man rationalizes his invention: "I didn't actually fool him, but merely omitted a detailed explanation." Closer to Murakami's heart still are his beloved Fab Four, whose album With the Beatles an ethereal young woman clutches to her chest, giving the narrator a madeleine for the rest of his life. Murakami's characters are typically flat of affect, protesting their ugliness and ordinariness, and puzzled or frightened by things as they are. But most are also philosophical even about those ordinary things, as is the narrator of that fine Beatles-tinged tale, who ponders why it is that pop songs are important and informative in youth, when our lives are happiest: "Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more." An essential addition to any Murakami fan's library.

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February 1, 2021
Whether in his epic-scale novels or in his shorter works, much of Murakami's appeal has always come from the beguiling way in which his characters react to wildly fantastical events in the most matter-of-fact manner, ever ready to accept how the twists and turns of everyday life can blend into more audacious alternate realities. In these eight stories, we see that phenomenon most disarmingly in ""Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,"" in which a monkey strides into a sauna at a remote hotel and asks the narrator if he would like to have his back scrubbed, speaking ""in the alluring voice of a doo-wop baritone."" It is the doo-wop note that pulls us into the story, somehow making this tale of a monkey looking for love utterly believable and all the more poignant. Similarly, in ""Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,"" the narrator begins by recounting how he once wrote a story positing that bebop pioneer Parker recorded a bossa-nova album (an impossibility for multiple reasons), but then the story changes direction when the fantasy album turns up in a record shop decades later, and Parker makes a dream cameo. The glue that holds together Murakami's blending realities--in these stories and, indeed, in all of his fiction--is always the narrator's love for something (a woman, a song, a baseball team, a moment in the past) that is both life-giving and deeply melancholic. Masterful short fiction.

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