s.penkevich's Reviews > First Person Singular: Stories

There is something I find very calm and comforting about reading Murakami. Perhaps it is because the protagonists always have this refined aloofness about them, unshakable in the face of an abrupt surrealist maelstrom as they simply crack a single small beer and vibe with whatever befalls them. It’s a mood, really, and one I’d love to be able to embody. Murakami’s writing helps affect this mood, its soft and winding river of introspective prose is like a lullaby to anxieties, and the stories are always a fantastical and philosophical, low-key extravaganza that manage to both appease both the literary and childlike-wonderment parts of the reader. First Person Singular, Murakami’s 2021 short story collection in lovely English translation by Phillip Gabriel (shout-out to translators, I love you all so much) are a succinct path to the heart of joy Murakami can bring. While I’ve been relatively into his short stories, I tend to think most of his novels (After the Quake is an exception as I do consider that collection as a whole to be one of my favorite Murakami books) when contemplating his oeuvre. This collection seems to hit on all the best of his notes and feels like a refreshing return to what makes him work after being underwhelmed by his two previous releases. A brief yet bountiful collection of short stories, First Person Singular is a distilled achievement of what makes Murakami great that pushes his own canonical boundaries and dazzles across each page.

'”And now here I was, a first person singular. If I’d chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn’t be here. But still - who is that in the mirror?'

Something I've always admired in Murakami is his ability to juxtapose reality and un-reality--the fantastical if you will--in a way that dissolves the dichotomy of the two. If something is meant to be "reality" or not becomes beside the point, and he dredges up a deeper understanding of the real by stepping outside in into the abstract. His most poignant moments exist in a realm adjacent to both the real and the un-real yet still embodying both in effect.

First Person Singular pushes his own boundaries into a teasing of autofiction, writing from the titular point of view in a reflective way. The beautifully mundane occasionally breaks into the fantastical (some stories more than others) but in a way that makes you believe there is some autobiographical element based in many of the stories, weaving his own reality with an authorial fiction that creates something more meaningful than the sum of its parts. He sort of self-mythologizes here, similar but different from the way Roberto Bolaño created a self-mythology dipping into autobiography and smuggling himself into his characters (curiously, I've always felt M and B to be ineffably linked in my mind and get a similar calming experience reading both). This abstract authorial brilliance is aided by the inclusion on one autobiographical piece in the mix, the whole collection capitalizing on the maxim that a lie is best accepted with a grain of truth in it.

This collection proves he can pack so much into so little and keep everything open for nuance. One thing I’ve always really appreciated in his short stories is the abject sadness he can instill in the reader with them (Ice Man is always one of the first to come to mind). This collection hits on that perfectly, as it tonally explores ‘all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness.’ What compounds with this emotional landscape is the way his messages are often ineffable beyond the brilliant production of the story’s unfolding into you. Murakami is less a work to be assessed, dissected and have each element pinned like a butterfly upon a board for review, but an elusive and abstract emotion to swallow deep into your being.

The opening story, Cream--a story where much of the piece is an elaborate and landscape-descriptive tone set-up to a brief conversation between strangers--seems to best describe Murakami’s intentions as writer to the reader. A man talks about a ‘circle with many centers but no circumference,’ which we should, logically, consider an impossible object. But Murakami deals in impossible objects and recommends that ‘there’s no need to know what it’s all about.’ His work is one of abstraction and emotion, not one-to-one metaphors and tidy explanations. ‘There is nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily,’ the old man tells the lost narrator, and Murakami’s work is like this. You can’t just reach for it, you have to let it pass through you and know you can never fully or succinctly restrain it into a simple image.

The collection of stories here is widespread yet still centralized around the notion of Murakami’s supposed life experiences. They feel real, and his tellings make them feel like you could believe they were your own memories on the page, and this is how he best sneaks in his most poignant gifts to you. The stories that deal in the mundane, like a one-night-encounter with a coworker and discovering she writes haunting poetry, or the multi-decade sage of memories adjacent to a former girlfriend who would later take her own life and conversations with her brother that juxtapose youth and adulthood, are some of the most impactful because of the closeness to realism. They collectively thread an impression of a lengthy life timeline and all the many disparate events that pass almost unnoticed yet leave a long-withstanding emotional residue, such as the image of a beautiful young classmate running through the halls clutching a Beatles vinyl to her chest in that same story (aptly titled Beatles).

But there are other, more fantastical stories that land just as well. One particular story, Charlie Parker Plays Bossanova, has a writer inside-joke like approach to a narrative not unlike the premise of Hari Kunzru’s White Tears where a college prank--reviewing a non-existent and impossible Charlie Parker album in the school magazine as a work of unannounced fiction--actualizes itself in a mysterious physical form in a New York city record shop. The dream-sequence at the end is powerful and unforgettable. There is also Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey, a sequel of sorts to the older story A Shinagawa Monkey, which might be the best in the collection and the most Murakamiesque of his tales here. The story involves Murakami having beers with a monkey as he details his existential dilemmas of stealing women’s names--literally--because he loves them but cannot actualize his desires. It’s phenomenal, and so very Murakami.

As one would expect in a biographical-type collection of an older author, aging is quite forefront to the themes here. Many of the stories knit together separate yet complimentary small events from multiple decades, letting you feel the passage of time and aging in the marrow of the stories. Murakami doesn’t fear or despise aging, but he acknowledges there are certain sadnesses attached.

’What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve gotten older...I think wahat makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces be to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being’

For Murakami, the dreamworld is just as relevant to us as the ‘real’ world, and the acknowledgement of dreams deferred or died weighs heavily into the tone of the book. These are stories of a man gone through a lot and reflecting back on younger days, self-mythologizing to help achieve a place of eternal, ineffable existences in the abstract nature of life. He examines poetry he loves (I was quite taken by this from a favorite author as someone who values poetry as a favorite art form), reflects on long-gone-to-dust relationships, and examines the absurdities in our daily lives. It is as wise and it is whimsical.

Murakami is, admittedly, a problematic favorite so take this review with a grain of that salt. He does have a notable slant towards the misogynist--particularly when regarding underaged women existing predominantly as an emotional support for the male protagonist, as Mieko Kawakami has addresses--and some of that even seeps its way into this collection, especially the ways the male gaze of body image is so often immediately noted as a description of who a woman is ( was never able to get into Men Without Women for much of these reasons). We should all have a conversation on this and address cultural points as well, and he is undeniably an engaging storyteller. The social mannerisms and conflicting emotions is real here, but he is clearly a key figure of modern literature and I do enjoy his works and being able to critique it is part of the enjoyment with broad oeuvre familiarity (academic approaches to criticism are nuanced and weird, right?). For reader's looking for an entry point, I would not recommend this one and perhaps one of his larger novels instead, but for those who are already fans I think this will appease you. This book is the sweet-spot of what I love about Murakami and it is all so delicately packaged in the short form.

4.5/5