First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. all with a signature Murakami twist.Ī GUARDIAN AND SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK Read more

Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Murakami himself is present. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios, an encounter with a talking monkey and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator.

A brilliant new collection of short stories from the unique mind of the internationally bestselling author of Men Without Women and Killing Commendatore.Ī mindbending new collection of short stories from the unique, internationally acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami