Eerie tales in classic Murakami collection
In Haruki Murakami’s new story collection, “First Person Singular,” one of his fictive everymen observes: “the world can turn upside down, depending on the way we look at it. The way a ray of sunshine falls on something can change shadow to light, or light to shadow. A positive becomes a negative, a negative a positive.” The passage encapsulates the deceptively simple brand of surrealism that has endeared Murakami’s work to millions of readers around the globe. “First Person Singular” will satisfy his fans and serve as a fine introduction to neophytes, echoing many of the uncanny scenarios of his earlier work.
In “Cream,” the opening story of the collection, a lovesick young man goes to a piano recital located in the mountains of Kobe, only to find no one there. In unsettling episodes that one might find in a Flannery O’Connor story, he encounters a car broadcasting a Christian message that everyone will die and be judged harshly for their sins, before meeting an old man who simply utters, “a circle with many centers.” From his novels “A Wild Sheep Chase” to “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” Murakami has used this simple plot often: An ordinary urbanite journeys to a rural area looking for answers, only to find more questions.
The specter of mortality looms larger in “First Person Singular” than in Murakami’s other work. In the stories that relive defining incidents from a narrator’s youth, Murakami’s characters no longer wonder what might have been.
Instead, they anticipate the shorter road ahead as in this elegiac passage from “On A Stone Pillow”: “Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely) people age in the blink of an eye. Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds these things - some with names, some without - disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?”
In the essay “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection,” Murakami writes about how much he loves going to Jingu Stadium to see his favorite baseball team; he even selfpublished a book of poetry about them several years before “A Wild Sheep Chase” was sold. His intense love of the experience of baseball fandom reveals how an older Murakami, now in his 70s, views time in relation to worldly accomplishments.
“Of course, winning is much better than losing ... But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time ... A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can - that’s what’s the most valuable. “