However, the stories do not fall into the typical melancholy nostalgia and are sympathetic to young readers. Each of the stories evokes a sense of the passing of time, the ageing of the protagonist and the prospect of death ahead. To this end, the author’s first-class metaphors, expressions, pedantic metaphors and homages connect with something in each reader’s mind and trigger the reader to spread the wings of his or her own imagination. Like drops of water coming together to form a river, they interact and connect towards the last story, or, more precisely, towards the last line of the final story. The first seven seemingly unrelated stories come together through the memories of the protagonist’s brain. All the stories, except the last one, proceed in Murakami’s characteristic narrative style, in which the narrator (the protagonist) recalls his own memories and mixes them up chronologically. That makes readers feel as if he or she is reading the personal narrative of the 71-year-old author.
This short story collection is the author’s first attempt to write a novel in which the narrator is a man of the same age as the author. At Kinokuniya Bookshop, Shinjuku in July 2020Īt the time of his debut in 1979, Murakami wrote his novels in the first person singular format, which he later developed into the third person plural and singular, but the age of the protagonist in the first person singular was always younger than that of the author at the time. The eight stories include memories of a mysterious old man, a missing poet, music and records, a first lover and literature, a monkey who speaks human, baseball and family, and an unexpected encounter with a woman.
First Person Singular is Haruki Murakami’s latest collection of short stories, released in Japanese in July 2020 and in English in April 2021.
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