As is true of most people, I imagine, I had experienced a number of turning points in my life, where I could go either left or right. And each time I chose one, right or left. (There were times when there was a clear-cut reason, but most of the time there wasn’t.) And it wasn’t always like I was making a choice, but more like the choice itself chose me. And now here I was, a first person singular. If I’d chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn’t be here. But still — who is that in the mirror?
(First Person Singular)
There’s something about a Haruki Murakami novel that can literally shake me to the core; I have a physical reaction to his surreal flights that feels like a reckoning. But, as I discovered with his last story collection (Men Without Women), Murakami’s short fiction just doesn’t engage me the same way. Even so, when I saw he had a new collection out this year — First Person Singular — I had to give him the benefit of the doubt...and once again...I was not shaken. I will always pick up Murakami, I was not exactly disappointed with this, but it was overall just okay.
In a recent interview with NPR, Murakami explains:
In this book, I wanted to try pursuing a “first person singular” format, but I don't like relating my experiences just the way they are. So I reshape them over and over and fictionalize them, to the point where, in some cases, you can't detect what they were modeled after. Through these steps, I gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the experience. Fiction writing is partly the process of clarifying what lies within you. There's a long tradition in modern Japanese literature of the autobiographical, so-called I-novel, the idea that sincerity lies in honestly and openly writing about your life, making a kind of self-confession. I'm opposed to that idea and wanted to create my own “first personal singular” writing.
And so, although I can’t have any idea to what extent these stories are based on actual events in Murakami’s life, I can say that they are all narrated in the first person singular, by what sounds like middle-aged, straight Japanese men who love jazz and baseball. (In The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection the narrator is a novelist identified as “Haruki Murakami”, but otherwise, the narrators are unnamed.) So, even though in one story (With The Beatles), the narrator complains about the kinds of “meaningless” questions that Literature classes ask about stories in the following way — With meaningless questions, it’s hard (or impossible) to determine logically if an answer is correct or not. I doubted whether even the authors of the selections themselves would have been able to decide. Things like “What can you glean from this passage about the writer’s stance toward war?” or “When the author describes the waxing and waning of the moon, what sort of symbolic effect is created?” You could give almost any answer. If you said that the description of the waxing and waning of the moon was simply a description of the waxing and waning of the moon, and created no symbolic effect, no one could say with certainty that your answer was wrong. Of course there was a relatively reasonable answer, but I didn’t really think that arriving at a relatively reasonable answer was one of the goals of studying literature. — I will take that as a warning from the author and still make a stab at interpreting what these stories aimed to achieve.
As stated, each of the eight stories is narrated in the first person singular and most of them open with a line like “So I’m telling a younger friend of mine about a strange incident that took place back when I was eighteen.” or “I’d like to tell a story about a woman.” These have the structure and feeling of memories related, and with only a couple of exceptions (an impossible LP found in a record shop, the return of a talking monkey, walking out of a bar into a surreal landscape), these, for the most part, read like straightforward memories of a middle-aged, straight Japanese man. Most of these stories involve remembrances of youthful love affairs, and mostly, they are interesting, self-deprecating, and relatable. On the other hand, it is often said of Murakami that his obsession with young girls (understandable when he was a young writer but growing ever creepier as he ages) is a turnoff for female readers, and indeed, I’ve read several reviews where female readers say they closed this book when they got to the opening of Carnaval, where the narrator begins with: “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest.” Women are certainly objectified in these stories — they also commit suicide, have their names “stolen”, and are used solely for meaningless sex without any protection from the narrators who relate their stories — and in the final, titular, story, the narrator is confronted in a bar by a strange woman who tells him “You should be ashamed of yourself.” The narrator of that story had apparently wronged a mutual female acquaintance a few months prior, and as angry as his accuser is, the man honestly has no idea what he might have done wrong. All of this to say: In the era of MeToo and the patriarchy being forced to confront their privilege and the demeaning power of the male gaze, is Murakami acknowledging the fact that he may have unwittingly wronged the fairer sex over the course of his career and ought to be ashamed of himself? That’s all I’ve got and who can say with certainty that my interpretation is wrong?
A few quotes I found striking, beginning with one from On a Stone Pillow
”Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,” she said, in a flat tone, like she was reciting something written on a wall.
From With The Beatles
What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve gotten older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without me realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty girls, the vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting — sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.
From Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey (Corny but made me smile.)
”How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.
“It’s very nice. Thank you,” I said. My voice reverberated densely, softly, in the steam. My voice sounded almost mythological. It didn’t sound like it came from me, but rather like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest. And that echo was...hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why is he speaking in a human language?
And this from Carnaval demonstrates a lovely ending (but I want to add that most stories weren’t tied up quite so neatly).
These were both nothing more than a pair of minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Short side trips along the way. Even if they hadn’t happened, I doubt my life would have wound up much different from what it is now. But still, these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. And when they do, their unexpected power shakes me to the core. Like an autumn wind that gusts at night, swirling fallen leaves in a forest, flattening the pampas grass in fields, and pounding hard on the doors to people’s homes, over and over again.
