The eight stories in “First Person Singular” share a deadening lack of curiosity. These puzzles were innovative when Murakami first published them three decades ago, but an innovation spun a dozen different ways is just repetition. The only appeal left to make to the reader is the brand name on the cover.īut after 2005’s dreamy Oedipal redux “ Kafka on the Shore,” Murakami put out insultingly onerous chronicles - “ 1Q84,” “ Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” and “ Killing Commendatore” - attempts to recapture the thrilling, mazelike quality of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Each performed the patented Murakami shtick: a lovelorn man on the cusp of 40, often oddly infatuated with a startlingly young woman, embarks on a quest to make sense of a set of indiscernible, probably meaningless “clues” to solve a psycho-emotional mystery only he perceives. The women are rubbed down into featureless nubs, the men deflated caricatures - popped balloons. They’re like copies of copies of copies of Murakami’s older work all the specificity and vivacity is blurred out. The real question is: Does the reader care? Each story is like the greenery filler in a grocery store bouquet: stiff and charmless, background fodder, indistinct organic matter. “Memoir or fiction?” the back cover asks. Others are standard Murakami fiction: a polite and charming talking monkey scrubs backs in a ryokan bath a college student in the 1960s embarks on his first love affair a jazz lover reminisces about a fantasy Charlie Parker album. Some of the stories allegedly are taken directly from the mega-novelist’s real life.
His new short-story collection, “ First Person Singular,” is predicated on a “Two Truths and a Lie”-type premise. Now Murakami has found himself stuck in the dank dark, so immersed in the total recall of the work that came before that he cannot see his way into the future. His middle-aged, perfectly ordinary, pasta-cooking protagonists often end up at the bottoms of wells, trapped for days like the protagonist of “Killing Commendatore,” or drawn down the ladder for some thinking time like Toru Okada in “ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” Wells serve as portals in Murakami’s work, tunnels into memory and forgetting. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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