First Person Singular

(Knopf, $28)

Haruki Murakami isn’t popular outside his native Japan only because of his love of jazz and baseball, said David Means in The New York Times. The master of the pop culture–inflected uncanny “fuses cultures, or perhaps leaps over them, defying time,” and his new story collection continues in that vein. But these eight tales, mostly focused on men who are puzzling over inexplicable events, feel dead on the page, “like copies of copies of copies of Murakami’s older work,” said Hillary Kelly in the Los Angeles Times. Worse, his treatment of women is “abhorrent”—several are leeringly described, and only one is granted a name. But Murakami is always trying to remind us how little we know about others except superficially, said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. In this collection’s standout, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” a talking primate recounts to the narrator how he became more interested in women than in other monkeys. The narrator later decides he must have imagined the encounter. But Murakami remains “a master of the mesmerizing head-scratcher,” and he never makes things that simple.