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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Apr 2021, 256 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2022, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Lisa Butts
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A mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami.
The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.
Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist.
Excerpt
First Person Singular
I hardly ever wear suits. At most, maybe two or three times a year, since there are rarely any situations where I need to get dressed up. I may wear a casual jacket on occasion, but no tie, or leather shoes. That's the type of life I chose for myself, so that's how things have worked out.
Sometimes, though, even when there's no need for it, I do decide to wear a suit and tie. Why? When I open my closet and check out what kind of clothes are there (I have to do that or else I don't know what kind of clothes I own), and gaze at the suits I've hardly ever worn, the dress shirts still in the dry cleaner's plastic garment bags, and the ties that look brand new, no trace of ever having been used, I start to feel apologetic toward these clothes. Then I try them on just to see how they look. I experiment with various tie knots to see if I still remember how to do them. Including one making a proper dimple. The only time I do all this is when I'm home alone. If ...
Each story features a narrator reflecting on a memory from the past in a state of ambiguous longing — not with a desire to recapture something they once had, but with a vague awareness that they missed something critical at the time the events occurred. They are detectives looking for clues in the ephemera of their pasts from a present that is generally undefined. There's an electric potency to Murakami's writing. The plots are tightly constructed in neat arcs, the themes are elegantly realized, the narrators' feelings of longing resonate...continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In the short story "With the Beatles" from his collection First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami refers to the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Tokyo's Kyōbashi district. His mother was mentally ill, and his father was unable to take care of him, so he was sent to live with an uncle. Often sickly as a child, he became a voracious reader, a habit that continued into adulthood and laid the foundation for his writing career. At 21, Akutagawa began studying English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo and founded a literary journal with friends called Shinshichō ("New Thought"). They published translations of foreign writers in addition to their own original work.
In 1915, Akutagawa ...
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