Book Review: First Person Singular, stories by Haruki Murakami (2020, English translation 2021)

The cover for the English translation of First Person Singular, stories by Haruki Murakami. English translation 2021. 

The Japanese novelist and short story writer Haruki Murakami.

The Japanese author Haruki Murakami is best known for his novels, but he’s also published several collections of short stories. His most recent collection of short stories is First Person Singular, released in Japan in 2020, and in English translation in 2021. True to the title, all eight stories in the book are written in, well, the first person singular.  

The narrators of these 8 stories sometimes have quite a bit in common with the real-life Haruki Murakami. Sometimes they are even named Haruki Murakami. Does that mean that these stories are true? Well, I doubt that Haruki Murakami actually met a talking monkey, as the narrator does in “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey.” But you never know.  

The stories detail some of Murakami’s obsessions, like jazz, classical music, and baseball. Western pop culture is another recurring theme as well. I enjoyed all of the stories in the book, and my four favorites were “On a Stone Pillow,” “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” “With the Beatles,” and “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection.”  

Describing the plots of Murakami short stories seems superfluous, as it’s less about what happens in the stories and more about the writing style. Murakami’s style is straightforward and easy to read, even as the events he’s describing might take a turn towards the surreal.  

In “On a Stone Pillow,” the narrator has a one-night stand with a woman who is afraid that she might yell out the name of another man during sex. She suggests that he can stuff a towel in her mouth so she can bite down on it at the moment of supreme passion. When that moment arrives, she does yell out a name, and even though her voice is muffled by the towel, the narrator can understand the name. “All I recall is that it was some nothing, run-of-the-mill name, and that I was impressed that such a bland name was, for her, precious and important.” (p.38)  

The woman also writes tanka poems, and she later sends him a collection of her poems that she has self-published. He ruminates about them, and wonders what they reveal about her personality.  

“Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” is a humorous story about the narrator writing a satirical review of an album that never existed, titled Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova. The satirical review tells us that this album was released in 1963, as bossa nova was becoming known outside of Brazil and taking the jazz world by storm. Of course, this album never happened, because Charlie Parker died in 1955. The narrator even went so far as to invent a track listing for the album. Much to his surprise, many years later, he finds a copy of a record titled Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova in a small record store. He doesn’t buy it, and then of course he never finds it again. Moral of the story: buy weird albums when you find them, because maybe you’ll never see them again. Even if it’s a weird album that your subconscious mind dreamed up and that doesn’t even exist in reality. Because you never know.  

“With the Beatles” has little to do with the album of that name. A memory of a girl holding that album triggers a reminiscence of the narrator’s girlfriend in high school. She wasn’t much of a Beatles fan though, as she preferred easy-listening music like Percy Faith and Ray Conniff rather than the Fab Four. The narrator recounts an odd encounter he had with his girlfriend’s older brother. It’s a melancholy story, and it also references the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “Spinning Gears.” 

There’s a beautiful part in the story where the narrator tells us about his high school girlfriend: “It’s hard for me to say this now, but she never rang that special bell inside my ears. I listened as hard as I could, but never once did it ring. Sadly. The girl I knew in Tokyo was the one who did it for me. This isn’t something you can choose freely, according to logic or morality. Either it happens or it doesn’t. When it does, it happens of its own accord, in your consciousness or in a deep spot in your soul.” (p.119-20)  

“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” is a great short story about my favorite sport, and also Haruki Murakami’s: baseball. Murakami paints a picture of what it’s like to be a baseball fan. When Murakami was a young man the Sankei Atoms (later to change their name to the Yakult Swallows) were a pretty lackluster team. “I’d enjoy it when the team won the odd game, and when they lost, I’d console myself with the thought that it’s important in life to get used to losing.” (p.207) When you’re following a team over a 162-game season in the US, or a 144-game season in Japan, even the best team will lose about one third of their games. You’d better get used to losing if you’re a baseball fan. As Murakami writes, “It’s true that life brings us far more defeats than victories. And real-life wisdom arises not so much from knowing how we might beat someone as from learning how to accept defeat with grace.” (p.208)  

The Haruki Murakami who is narrating the short story tells us that he wrote a book of poems about baseball called The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. The narrator Haruki Murakami also wrote novels titled Hear the Wind Sing and A Wild Sheep Chase, just like the real-life Haruki Murakami. But to add to the confusion, the real-life Haruki Murakami did not write a volume of poems titled The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. (The narrator fooled me, as I went searching through Murakami’s bibliography.) And I suppose that’s the point: to make something sound like it might be true, even though it’s not. Because I’m a baseball fan, I love the idea of the real-life Haruki Murakami writing a book of poems about his favorite baseball team, even though it’s something only the fictional Haruki Murakami has done. If I ever meet the real-life Haruki Murakami, I’ll tell him I like his baseball poems. And maybe we can watch a baseball game together over some dark beer.  

First Person Singular is an absorbing collection of short stories, and a look into some of the obsessions and preoccupations of Haruki Murakami.