First Person Singular: Stories
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Haruki Murakami delivers an enthralling First Person Singular
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First Person Singular.
The stories in Haruki Murakami s new collection,
First Person Singular, have a sort of fractal nature you re reading a story by a middle-aged Japanese man in which a middle-aged Japanese man is telling you a story (and sometimes that story involves him telling other stories). You get drawn into the spiral, and soon you re in that strange world where many of his stories exist, a place full of his favorite things (jazz, baseball, the Beatles, though surprisingly few cats this time) and yet unmistakably odd, existing at a slight, unexplained angle to reality. In this book, I wanted to try pursuing a first person singular format, but I don t like relating my experiences just the way they are, Murakami tells me in an email interview. So I reshape them over and over and fictionalize them, to the point where, in some cases, you can t detect what they were modeled after. Through these steps, I gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the experience.