First Person Singular — Stories

First Person Singular Review

Late in a career as monumental as Haruki Murakami’s, an author can afford to turn inward, and First Person Singular is the sound of him doing exactly that. Published in Japanese in 2020 and translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 2021, this collection of eight stories shares a single, deceptively simple conceit announced in its title: every tale is narrated in the first person by a man who looks, sounds, and remembers a great deal like Murakami himself. The result is a quiet, intimate, frequently melancholy book that plays a sustained game with the membrane between memoir and fiction — never quite confessing, never quite inventing, always hovering in the uncertain space between.

This is not the Murakami of vast, surreal architectures like 1Q84 or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It is a smaller, more confiding voice, the voice of a man in his seventies sifting through what he remembers and wondering how much of it actually happened. For readers who come to Murakami for sprawling parallel worlds, that lowered ambition may register as a disappointment. For those who love his preoccupation with memory, loss, and the strangeness lurking under ordinary life, it is a rewarding, if modest, pleasure.

The Autobiographical Game

The unifying trick of First Person Singular is its narrator. Across all eight stories, a reflective, often-lonely man recounts episodes from his life, and Murakami repeatedly seeds these accounts with details that map onto his own biography — a love of jazz, a fascination with classical music, a passion for baseball, the habits and tastes of a successful novelist. The reader is invited to ask, again and again, whether this is the author speaking plainly or a character wearing the author’s clothes.

That ambiguity is the point. Murakami uses the first-person frame to interrogate how memory constructs identity, how the stories we tell about our younger selves are themselves a kind of fiction. The narrators are unreliable not because they lie but because the past is genuinely irretrievable; they reach for it and close their hands on mist. This metafictional play gives the collection its distinctive flavor — confessional in tone, slippery in fact.

Memory and Music

Music is the connective tissue of the book, as it so often is in Murakami’s work. “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” imagines a record that never existed, a piece of jazz counterfactual that becomes a meditation on art, memory, and the dead. “With the Beatles” uses the iconic album cover as a portal back into adolescence, first love, and the way a single image can anchor an entire era of one’s life. “Carnaval” turns on Schumann’s piano cycle of the same name and a friendship with a woman the narrator describes, provocatively, as the ugliest he has ever known.

These music-saturated stories are among the collection’s strongest, because they fuse Murakami’s two great subjects — sound and remembrance — into something genuinely moving. He writes about listening the way other authors write about falling in love: as an experience that reorganizes the self. The reader does not need to know the records to feel the ache of nostalgia they carry.

The Surreal Touches

For all its autobiographical realism, First Person Singular never fully abandons the uncanny, and the collection’s most celebrated story leans hard into it. “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” — a sequel of sorts to an earlier Murakami tale — features a talking monkey who works at a shabby hot-spring inn and confesses to a peculiar compulsion: he steals the names of women he loves. It is funny, sad, and quietly profound, a fable about desire, identity, and what it means to lose the word that makes you yourself. It is also the clearest reminder that even in his most personal mode, Murakami’s imagination tilts toward the strange.

Other stories shimmer with smaller eeriness. “Cream” centers on a baffling, possibly impossible errand and a cryptic old man who poses a koan-like riddle about a circle with many centers and no circumference. “On a Stone Pillow” recovers a one-night encounter with a woman who writes tanka poems about death. The title story, “First Person Singular,” ends the book on a note of genuine unease, as the narrator is accused, in a bar, of some unnamed wrong he cannot identify. These liminal encounters keep the collection from settling into pure reminiscence.

The Lighter Notes

Not everything is freighted with melancholy. “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” indulges Murakami’s persona as a long-suffering baseball fan, devoted to a perennially mediocre team, and reads almost like a wry personal essay studded with self-deprecating poems. It is the most overtly playful piece in the book and a welcome change of texture, showing the author content simply to be charming.

Where It Falls Short

First Person Singular is a minor-key work, and honesty requires acknowledging its limits. A couple of the entries feel less like complete stories than like sketches or essays, atmospheric but thin. The recurring narrator, so central to the book’s design, can also flatten the eight pieces into a single sustained mood; read in one sitting, they risk blurring together. And readers craving plot, propulsion, or resolution will find this a deliberately muted experience. These are stories about the texture of memory, not the machinery of events.

How It Compares

Set beside Murakami’s other collections, First Person Singular is gentler and more inward than the eclectic, often wilder The Elephant Vanishes, and thematically narrower than Men Without Women, which circled the specific subject of solitary men and lost loves. What it offers that those do not is the explicit autobiographical frame — the sense of an author near the end of his great productive arc, turning the lens directly on himself and the unreliable archive of his own past. It is a book for readers already fond of Murakami rather than a first encounter, but for them it is a quietly resonant addition to the shelf.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A reflective, music-haunted late-Murakami collection whose best stories linger even if the whole feels intentionally slight.