First Person Singular

Stories

By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator

Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe

NATIONAL BEST SELLER • A mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author. • “Some novelists hold a mirror up to the world and some, like Haruki Murakami, use the mirror as a portal to a universe hidden beyond it.” —The Wall Street Journal

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.

My favorite human

Haruki Murakami tells it as it is to be a human. He’s my favorite writer, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, or poetry about the butts of baseball players. This collection of self reflective essays dazzle with his indelible mark of human experiences in which it’s not always clear where the frontiers among real and imagined entwine and enfold. And the readers voice is adorable and profound at the same time.

Interesting and enjoyable

I enjoyed the stories. The reading felt a little slow for me so I listened at 1.2 speed.

Sorry, Ladies, but you're doing it wrong

First off, Murakami has a fascinating mind. I've got no trifle with a weird, narcissistic, point of view when devoted to fiction.

But there's some real old-school misogyny here that isn't just cringe-inducing, it's distracting. All beautiful women are beautiful in the same way? As a declarative statement, it diverted my attention to the variety of obstacles faced by women who are simply trying to get through our lives with some modicum of personal success and dignity.

First, WTF is beauty? Is that a judgement on whether or not one particualr male finds us worth seducing (or some darker phrase you can insert here)? Does it mean that beauty replaces any notion of drive, talent, and indivduality?

I'll stop with the interrogatories to say, as far as I can deduce from Murakami's writing, yes. Yes to all these questions.

And that's too bad, because the whole rest of the collection is wonderfully weird, unique, captivating, etc. But a short story devolted singularly to female beauty, or the lack thereof, means I had little else in my mind but the old chant "this is why we can't have nice things."

Somewhere in these pages there's a monkey. Read it for the monkey, and, I'm sure, all the other stories I must have enjoyed along the way.

Great narrator

Nice collection of short stories, and I really loved the fact that the narrator is Japanese.

Fascinating

Murakami never disappoints, he is a master of magic realism at its best. These short stories are another example of his unique style; smooth yet sophisticated.