First Person Singular

First Person Singular is a patch of intense variety and colour… Murakami’s protagonists tend to be introspective, ordinary men who find themselves confronted by women and unusual situations. It is as much their reactions to events as the events themselves that make his books so brilliant – Arjun Neil Alim * Evening Standard *Mind-bending…touches beautifully on love, solitude, childhood memories, dreamlike scenarios, invented jazz albums and meditations on music. In true Murakami tale-telling perfection, it’s devourable * Irish Daily Mail *I never tire of re-entering Murakami’s world, finding his Proustian ability to covey the texture of memory exhilarating, and his fatalistic heroes and their deadpan response to the melodramatic and the outré soothing – Jake Kerridge * Daily Telegraph *These stories are unmistakably Murakami’s for the way they traffic in his signature themes of time and memory, nostalgia and young love… each one [story] has insights that remain with you long after they are done – Alexander Nurnberh * Sunday Times *The hallmarks of Haruki Murakami’s longer fiction are all here; an enigmatic eeriness which hints at the supernatural in everyday situations, a love of jazz and baseball, and the nourishing nostalgia of pop music * Daily Mail *The short stories are an excellent entry point for Murakami neophytes. If he has passed you by and you’re trying to work out where to begin they’ll give you an immediate taste for whether his tone and effect works for you or leaves you cold: without the pressure of hundreds of pages and epic scope, he’s stripped back to the deeply human, deeply funny weirdness that defines his best work. * Sydney Morning Herald *At his strongest he’s like Kafka in Tokyo * Herald *Thought-provoking: the essence of life, Murakami suggests, is grappling with the inexplicable – Anthony Gardner * Mail on Sunday *Philosophical and mysterious, the stories in First Person Singular all touch beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory - all with a signature Murakami twist * Sheerluxe *A wonderfully surreal collection of short stories… Murakami has an ability to make the mundane fantastical and the fantastical mundane… First Person Singular is an engaging and enigmatic collection to savour and enjoy * Essential Marbella *

Haruki Murakami (Author)

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami’s distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Philip Gabriel (Translator)

Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams- Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters- The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.