First Person Singular: Stories

About

Eight stories told by a narrator who sounds like Murakami but might not be — a man who loves jazz, baseball, and the strange currents that run beneath ordinary life. Memories of youth blur into dreamlike scenarios. A chance encounter at a bar leads somewhere impossible. A poem by a dead woman rearranges the narrator's understanding of beauty. Reality holds steady until, without warning, it doesn't. These stories represent Murakami at his most personal and his most unsettling. Stripped of the epic architecture of his novels, the weirdness feels closer — as if the portal to somewhere else is not in a well or a hotel corridor but in the everyday act of remembering who you used to be. A collection that reminds you why Murakami became Murakami — and proves that the strangest territory he explores has always been the self.