Just Finished Reading: First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (FP: 2020) [245pp] 

I have been hearing good things, indeed great things, about Murakami for some years now so picking up a collection of his short stories seemed to me a no-brainer. Although I’m still musing about how I feel about him/his writing I’m certainly not sorry that I (finally) took the plunge. 

This collection contained 8 short stories all of which are based in Japan. What I’m struggling with is exactly how to classify them. They’re... odd. Not exactly Fantasy or even the much-used phrase ‘Magical Realism’, but strange, almost dreamlike at times. Although all of the stories are essentially based in reality, they have a quality about them that's hard to pin down – as you can no doubt tell from me struggling with definitions and my thoughts on the topic even after two weeks thinking about it. I think that at the heart of his stories – at least in these examples – are encounters with the surreal, even with the supernatural (but in a deeper, more philosophical, sense than mere ghosts). 

There’s Cream, where a vacillating student is invited to a music recital at a locked and obviously abandoned building where he meets an old man who tells him how to reset his life. The funny Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova where a strange record store selling impossible records is discovered and lost in the space of a few hours, and the even stranger tale Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey, where a talking monkey relates his life story to a hostel’s single guest (but who would believe him, right?) only to have it kind of confirmed some years later in a random encounter. 

I think that the only word that describes the feeling I had when I turned the last page was haunting. It was almost as if the reader is given a glimpse, a short insight, a peek behind the curtain of reality to see, if only for a few brief seconds what is really going on. Sort of less ‘magical realism’, more real reality. It was weird, strange, bizarre and very well written. I can certainly see why the author is so well regarded. Needless to say, I shall be reading more of his work. I think I want my reality stretched again in such intriguing ways. Definitely recommended if you don’t mind your sense of reality being bent a little bit.          

Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel