First Person Singular

This collection of eight short stories, all narrated in the first person, blends autobiographical reflection, music, memory, and moments of magical realism. The narrators share many qualities, including a deep love of music, nostalgia for youth, and a tendency to encounter the inexplicable in ordinary life.

In "Cream," the narrator recounts to a younger friend a strange experience from when he was eighteen. That year, he was an academic ronin, a Japanese student preparing to retake a failed university entrance exam, though he spent his time reading novels rather than studying. He receives a surprise invitation to a piano recital from a girl who attended the same piano school. Curious, he travels to a concert hall atop a mountain in Kobe, only to find the venue locked and deserted. He stops at a park on the way down, where confusion over whether the invitation was a deliberate hoax triggers a hyperventilation episode. While he sits with his eyes shut, an elderly man appears and poses a cryptic riddle: Imagine a circle with many centers and no circumference. The old man tells him that grasping this impossible figure is the crème de la crème, the essence of life. When the narrator opens his eyes, the old man has vanished and his breathing has returned to normal. Years later, the narrator believes the circle may exist only in the mind, accessible in moments of deep love, compassion, or faith.

"On a Stone Pillow" looks back on a single night the narrator spent, at nineteen, with a woman in her mid-twenties. They worked together briefly at a cheap Italian restaurant in Tokyo. After her farewell drinks with coworkers, she asks to stay at his apartment rather than ride the train home. Before they have sex, she warns him she will yell another man's name at climax. She loves this man intensely, but he only calls her when he wants her body. They both know they will never see each other again. A week later, her self-published poetry collection, On a Stone Pillow, arrives under the pen name Chiho. Its forty-two tanka, a traditional Japanese short verse form, intertwine love with images of death. Years later, the narrator cannot recall her real name or face, only the pen name and the moles beside her nose.

In "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova," the narrator recounts how, during college, he wrote a fictional review of an imaginary album by Charlie "Bird" Parker, the legendary bebop alto saxophonist who died in 1955. The review imagines Parker surviving into the 1960s to record a bossa nova album with Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. Published in a university literary journal whose editor believes the album is real, the article provokes complaints and sends readers to record stores searching for it. Nearly fifteen years later, the narrator finds a bootleg-looking LP in a New York used-record store with the exact title, track listing, and musicians he had invented. He leaves without buying it, and when he returns the next morning, the record is gone; the store owner insists it never existed. Much later, the narrator dreams that Parker appears in a beam of light, plays "Corcovado" solo on a battered saxophone, and thanks him for the chance to play bossa nova even after death.

"With the Beatles" weaves together reflections on aging, first love, and loss. In the fall of 1964, at his high school in Kobe, the narrator glimpses a beautiful girl hurrying down a dim hallway clutching the Beatles LP With the Beatles to her chest. His heart pounds and a faint bell rings in his ears, a sensation lasting only seconds but becoming a lifelong gauge for romantic yearning. He never sees the girl again. In 1965, he begins dating Sayoko, his first real girlfriend. One Sunday, he arrives at Sayoko's house on the wrong day and meets her reclusive older brother, who confides that he has a rare neurological condition causing his memory to cut out unpredictably. Eighteen years later, the narrator runs into the brother in Tokyo. Now healthy and successful, the brother reveals that Sayoko died by suicide at thirty-two: She married, had two children, then saved up sleeping pills over six months and took them all at once, leaving no note. The narrator reflects that Sayoko never rang that special bell inside his ears, though he experienced the sensation with someone else, and that this is not something one can choose.

"Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey" begins when the narrator ends up at a decrepit hot springs inn in Gunma Prefecture. While soaking in the bath, a monkey enters, speaks fluent Japanese, and offers to scrub his back. The monkey explains he was raised by a physics professor in Shinagawa, a district of Tokyo, and learned human language in the household. Over beer that evening, the monkey confesses he can only love human women and developed a supernatural ability: By stealing a woman's physical ID and concentrating on her name, he absorbs a fragment of her identity. The women sometimes find they cannot remember their own names. Five years later, the narrator meets an editor who periodically forgets her name, a problem that began after her driver's license was stolen near Shinagawa. The narrator suspects the monkey but cannot bring himself to tell her.

In "Carnaval," the narrator befriends F, a woman he describes as profoundly ugly, her appearance not the result of any single flaw but an organic composite that demands total acceptance or total rejection. Despite her looks, she is sharp and magnetic. They bond over Robert Schumann's piano piece Carnaval, forming a private two-member club and spending six months listening to recordings and attending performances. F argues that Schumann's cheerful carnival masks conceal dark forces within his psyche. Then F stops responding to calls. The narrator sees her on the news: She has been arrested as an accomplice in a large-scale investment fraud run by her husband, a staggeringly handsome man six years her junior. F disappears from the narrator's life entirely.

"The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection" is a loosely structured personal essay in which the narrator, identified as Haruki Murakami, reflects on his devotion to the Yakult Swallows, a long-suffering Japanese baseball team. He traces his love of baseball to childhood trips to Koshien Stadium and explains that he began supporting the Swallows' predecessor, the Sankei Atoms, in 1968, when he moved to Tokyo for college. In 1978, the year the team won its first championship, the narrator also wrote his first novel, a coincidence he sees as possibly karmic. He intersperses poems written at the stadium with memories of his father, a devoted Hanshin Tigers fan whose moods after defeats may have driven the narrator toward a different team. The piece closes with the narrator comparing himself to a young beer vendor who apologizes for only having dark beer, a metaphor for his own work as a novelist.

The title story, "First Person Singular," finds the narrator dressing up in a suit and tie on a whim while home alone. Standing before the mirror, he feels an inexplicable twinge of guilt, as though he has embellished a résumé. He walks to an unfamiliar basement bar and orders a vodka gimlet. A petite, elegantly dressed woman of about fifty sits next to him and confronts him with barely concealed hostility. She criticizes his suit, tells him she is a friend of a former close friend of his, and accuses him of something horrible "three years ago, at the shore." The narrator has no memory of any such event but is seized by fear, afraid of discovering that some version of himself committed an offense he knows nothing about. He pays and leaves. When he reaches the street, the world has transformed: The moon has vanished, the trees are wrapped in thick snakes, the sidewalk is deep in ash, and faceless figures exhale sulfurous breath. The story ends with the woman's accusation echoing: "You should be ashamed of yourself."