Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami.
The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides.
Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist.
Each story features a narrator reflecting on a memory from the past in a state of ambiguous longing — not with a desire to recapture something they once had, but with a vague awareness that they missed something critical at the time the events occurred. They are detectives looking for clues in the ephemera of their pasts from a present that is generally undefined. There's an electric potency to Murakami's writing. The plots are tightly constructed in neat arcs, the themes are elegantly realized, the narrators' feelings of longing resonate...continued
Full Review
(686 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In the short story "With the Beatles" from his collection First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami refers to the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Tokyo's Kyōbashi district. His mother was mentally ill, and his father was unable to take care of him, so he was sent to live with an uncle. Often sickly as a child, he became a voracious reader, a habit that continued into adulthood and laid the foundation for his writing career. At 21, Akutagawa began studying English literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo and founded a literary journal with friends called Shinshichō ("New Thought"). They published translations of foreign writers in addition to their own original work.
In 1915, Akutagawa ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked First Person Singular, try these:
by Ananda Lima
Published 2024
Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry―Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.
by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Published 2022
In nine stories that span the globe, What We Fed to the Manticore takes readers inside the minds of a full cast of animal narrators to understand the triumphs, heartbreaks, and complexities of the creatures that share our world.