This is the first collection of Murakami’s stories to be translated into English since Men Without Women (2017). The title story is the only one not previously published. While many of the stories have been published in English, including in Granta and the New Yorker, seven also appeared in the Japanese literary magazine Bungakukai between 2018 and 2020. As the title indicates, the stories are narrated in the first-person singular mode, all from the perspective of older misanthropic men. However, in a pertinent moment in the title story, a mirror in the cocktail bar defamiliarises the narrator’s image, leading him to question whether there is an omniscient narrator controlling his actions: ‘it wasn’t always like I was making a choice, but more like the choice itself chose me’.

This questioning of authorial intent is also apparent in ‘The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection’, where the narrator identifies himself as ‘Haruki Murakami’, obscuring the divide between fiction and memoir. This story explores a fan’s unwavering support for a losing baseball team and gives the reader an insight into Murakami, who is a ‘loyal fan’ of the Swallows. He begins: ‘I’d like to make this clear from the start: I love baseball, and what I really love is actually going to a stadium and watching a live game played right in front of me.’

Much has been written about the appeal of baseball to the Japanese. When it was imported from America in the nineteenth century, the game relied on teamwork and sacrifice, qualities the Japanese prize, and while American baseball subsequently evolved into a game that prioritises power and individual flair, the Japanese happily stayed true to the game’s roots. In ‘The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection’, Murakami writes about his love of old ballparks, and his stoic support for the perennially losing Swallows. His reverence for Koshien, home of the Hanshin Tigers and the oldest ballpark in Japan, is reminiscent of baseball writer Philip Lowry’s famous description of stadiums as ‘green cathedrals’. Murakami’s writing here is almost spiritual:

Back when I was a boy, I’d rush to the stadium with my ticket in hand, pass through the ivy-covered entrance, and hurry up the dimly lit concrete stairs. And when the natural grass of the outfield leapt into view, and that brilliant ocean of green spread out before me, my little heart beat loudly with excitement.

The story outlines Murakami’s move to Tokyo, and his gravitation to the Yakult Swallows, who play in the second-oldest stadium in Japan, Meiji Jingu. He describes lazy afternoons in the sun, watching the game and writing poetry, undeterred by the Swallows’ losing streak. Indeed, Murakami consoles himself that it taught him how to be resilient. This is important, given that the poems in this short story are fairly banal and that, as he confesses, ‘many publishers were wise enough … not to show even a smidge of interest in putting out my book of poems, so I ended up basically self-publishing it.’

Poetry is also present in ‘On a Stone Pillow’, whose narrator discusses his encounter with a woman who has published her tanka poems in a ‘pamphlet-like volume that barely rose to the level of a self-published book’. She tells him in bed, ‘I might yell another man’s name when I come’, which is an indication that Murakami’s depiction of women continues to be hugely problematic in his fiction. Women are superficial and fetishised – they are often sex objects or exist only to give meaning to the male narrator’s life, as a kind of Japanese Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The most difficult story to read is ‘Carnaval’, which begins, ‘Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest.’ As the narrator regularly meets the woman known only as F* to discuss Schumann, he states as an aside, ‘I won’t deny that F*’s unattractive looks played a major role in my wife’s disinterest. She didn’t have a bit of suspicion or doubt that F* and I might fall into a sexual relationship, a major benefit her looks afforded us.’ Furthermore, in ‘With the Beatles’, the narrator is obsessed with a ‘beautiful, nameless girl’ he saw in 1964 clutching a Beatles LP. Years later, when he learns that his former girlfriend, Sayoko, committed suicide at thirty-two, he returns to the fantasy image of ‘the lovely young girl, the hem of her skirt fluttering … holding that wonderful album cover’. In its infectious obsession with music, much more successful is the quirky ‘Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova’, where a jazz critic writes a hoax review that ends up having supernatural implications.

Murakami has been translated into over fifty languages and has sold millions of copies of his books. His popularity is such that he has recently collaborated with Uniqlo to create T-shirts using graphics from his books and radio program. The stories in First Person Singular might be more of what we have come to expect from him, but they certainly beguile in exploring the creative power of social misfits.