Author and narrator, fiction and memory, never settle comfortably into their proper places. Even then-though the mention at first seems to be an admission that it is really he, Murakami the writer, who is telling the story-doubts set in: it could be that Murakami, the writer, is merely intervening in the narration. Only in one story, one time, does Murakami mention himself by name. He’s not necessarily the same person from story to story sometimes he’s past youth, sometimes near or well into middle-age, other times elderly. Yet the memory of it imprints the narrator’s psyche, compelling him to recount it, sometimes decades later. Sometimes the narrator (and the reader) wonders if the encounter actually took place. The person (or monkey) drops briefly into the narrator’s life, then disappears. Most of the stories in this new collection revolve around chance encounters: a talking monkey an unexpectedly hostile woman an old, wise (and/or unstable?) man on a park bench a girlfriend’s brother with intermittent amnesia the return of (dead) sax player Charlie “Bird” Parker. (With plenty of references to music, across all genres.) True, the narrator often establishes the mood right away: “So I’m telling a younger friend of mine about a strange incident…” “I met the elderly monkey…” But mainly, when you’re reading the work of Haruki Murakami you know things are likely to start off odd, get pretty weird, and finish in an unsettling, or at least perplexing, manner. Almost from the first word, you know something’s off-center about each story in First Person Singular.

First person singular haruki murakami