02/05/2021 First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami — stories for the aficionados | Financial Times
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First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami — stories for the aficionados
The jazz records, talking monkeys and Escher-like plots are all present in a collection from a writer at
ease in his own skin
© Shutterstock
David Pilling APRIL 27 2021
Occasionally, galleries put on exhibitions of an artist’s sketches. Instead of finished
works or acknowledged masterpieces, on display are doodles in which the painter
experiments with the concepts that will eventually be incorporated into more
mature work.
First Person Singular, a collection of eight short stories by the cult Japanese
author Haruki Murakami, reads like that. Only instead of youthful preparatory
work, these are the musings of an older man looking back on some of the
Murakami-esque things that happened to him in his real, or imagined, youth.
“Once again, I was confused. It felt like bits of reality and unreality were randomly
changing places,” Murakami announces at one point as if explaining the modus
operandi that underlies all his writing.
In these stories, ordinary happenings take
on a twist. The humdrum shifts, laying bare
a psychological discombobulation as the
narrator wonders whether his reality is the
same as that experienced by everybody else.
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02/05/2021 First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami — stories for the aficionados | Financial Times
An older Murakami is A girl does not show up for a date that she
more resigned to life’s seems to have planned deliberately and
elaborately to humiliate him. A woman he
little absurdities and
encounters in a bar quizzes him angrily
unexplained about an alleged offence of which he has no
phenomena recollection. A hot-spring companion turns
out to be not a chatty traveller, but a talking
monkey with a penchant for beer and for
stealing people’s names. The monkey aside, the slips of perception are so slight
that what is real and what is imagined blur and elide.
There’s a touch of imposter syndrome here that may relate to Murakami’s own
incomprehension at his phenomenal success.
There is also an Escher-like quality, in which reality and fantasy converge on a
winding staircase of plot. A younger Murakami publishes a spoof review of a non-
existent jazz record. Many years later, the same man is leafing through sleeves in a
New York record shop when he comes across the very album he had invented.
“Was this really New York?” he asks fearing he has fallen into some hyperrealist
dream. “This was downtown New York — no doubt about it. And I was actually
here, in a small used-record store. I hadn’t wandered into some fantasy world.”
The writing can be simple to the point of banal. The ideas are more elaborately
developed in earlier, more complete works such as Hard Boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World or 1Q84. For that reason, Murakami first-timers should
probably skip this slight volume and go for one of those more substantial novels
instead.
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02/05/2021 First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami — stories for the aficionados | Financial Times
Yet there is something for Murakami aficionados in these stories by a writer at ease
in his own skin. The search for truth is less urgent. The quests of earlier novels
were “wild sheep chases” in which disorientated protagonists searched urgently
and earnestly for an underlying meaning that was never really there.
An older Murakami is more resigned to life’s little absurdities and unexplained
phenomena. The aborted date is just one of those things. The angry woman may
have a point. And the monkey. Well, the monkey is just a monkey.
First Person Singular, by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel,
Harvill Secker, RRP£16.99/Knopf, RRP$28, 256 pages
David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor
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