First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami

While Murakami’s more thrilling novels contain war crimes, sexual deviancy and other sinister elements, the abiding tone here is of grandfatherly niceness. “Theme?” he writes, addressing an imaginary editor. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking in a human language?”) That this story was first published in the New Yorker suggests not only that Murakami isn’t even trying, but that he no longer has to. Worse is to come in Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey, a childish tale of a talking monkey that made me feel I was being treated like a simpleton (“… hold on a second.

Halfway through, however, the metafiction takes such a silly turn that calling it bargain-basement Borges would be giving it too much credit. The cynic in me wonders if the bizarrely limp style is a performance calculated to disarmĬharlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova begins promisingly, with the narrator analysing a short story he’d published as a student, which purports to review a newly unearthed album by the great jazz musician. Carnaval recounts a music-based friendship the narrator enjoyed when he was 50 with “the ugliest” woman he has ever known (her name, for some reason, is given as “F*”). The enjoyable second story, On a Stone Pillow, tells of a teenage night spent with a poet who yells another man’s name when she comes. While his novels tend towards the baroque and the fantastical, First Person Singular works best when Murakami keeps it simple in stories that resemble memoir and recount affairs, friendships or one-night stands from bygone decades. The book is not without its charms and Murakami’s mild and affable authorial persona will please his fans. Among its themes are nostalgia, music and erotic reminiscence.

Murakami’s 22nd book is a collection of eight short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, all narrated in the first person by an elderly writer (who in one story is explicitly named Haruki Murakami).

(For proof that a birthdate in the 1940s needn’t correlate with poor writing in the 2020s, see Martin Amis’s amazing Inside Story.) All of which loosens my natural hesitancy to lay into a septuagenarian (Murakami was born in 1949) so that I can divulge up front that his latest, First Person Singular, is not very good. Whatever the phenomenally popular Japanese writer knocks out will sell by the truckload – the reviews just notify his throng of devotees that it’s time to buy a new Murakami. R eviewing a book by Haruki Murakami is to some degree a redundant act.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami