Book Review: First Person Singular: A Novel

From First Person Singular, by Haruki Murakami:

Amazon

"I was in New York on business and, with time on my hands, took a walk near my hotel and ducked inside a small used-record store I came across on East Fourteenth Street. And in the section of Charlie Parker records I found, of all things, a record titled Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova. It looked like a bootleg, a privately pressed recording."

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Book Review: "First Person Singular: Stories"

Grade: B+

"First Person Singular" consists of eight stories by Haruki Murakami. The excerpt is from "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova" and captures the essence of Murakami and this collection. Murakami often sprinkles his fiction with jazz (and baseball), reflecting his personal interest in Western popular culture. Another telltale trait of a Murakami story is the presence of magical realism. In this story, the narrator comes across a fictional vinyl album by jazz great Charlie Parker, supposedly recorded in 1963, even though in real life Parker died in 1955.

The best example of magical realism is in another story, "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey", in which the narrator meets an aging monkey who lives at a remote inn and offers to scrub the narrator's back. The monkey also drinks beer. One night while sharing a beer, the monkey tells the narrator about meeting human women and stealing their names. If that sounds bizarre, it's because it is. But it's the kind of detail that tells you that you are reading a Murakami story.

Murakami isn't for everyone, but his combination of the familiar with the bizarre has earned him a large following in both Japan and America. If Murakami had fleshed out some of these stories, I would have willingly given the collection an A-.