Synopsis | First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, Bugeishunju, 2020 | Jean-Michel Serres, Composer-pianist (Apfel Café Music): Website

Information of the Book

First Person Singular is a short story collection book by Haruki Murakami, originally published in 2020. This book is consist of eight short stories. Descriptions of each of the stories are wrote by simple first person singular noun and its view. So the stories appears to be made by real personal experiences, and their mysterious occurrences have a certain reality.

On a Stone Pillow

When I was 19 years old, at a night, my apartment in Asagaya, I slept once with Chiho, a middle of twenties woman, a co-worker of a cheap Italian restaurant and wrote tanka (a style of Japanese short poem). The next morning, she asked to me “Do you want to hear my tankas ?”, I nodded, but hesitated to recite her tankas, so she sent her almost-handmade tanka collection titled On a Stone Pillow to me. The book puts 28 tankas about love between men and women, and death divides the love. When I read her tankas (…)

Cream

When I was 18 years old and a cram school student for university entrance examinations, I had a mysterious experience. I had been received an invitation to a piano recital by a girl had been took lessons in a same piano school, but I and she wasn’t particularly friendly. I went to the concert hall on a mountain in Kobe by bus. There were the hall but there are no people and the recital didn’t hold. So I compelled to sit down a bench in a park near the hall, and I heard Christian sermons from an advertising van. The van went away, suddenly, I was struck by a stress-related hyperventilation. When I became conscious, an old man who is sound in mind and body sat down next to me, and he said “A circle with many pivots it is.” and if I accomplished difficult things, they would become cream of the life, ”crème de la crème” in French, as they are (…)

Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova

I wrote a detailed review of an imaginary record Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova (features Antonio Carlos Jobim (piano), Jimmy Raney (guitar), Jimmy Garrison (base) and Roy Haynes (drummer)) recorded in 1963, and it appeared in a students’ review magazine of a university. 15 years later, strangely, I found the record Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova is complete identical to my description, in a small secondhand record shop on East 14th Street in New York. But it seemed to be a private bootleg or a trick (Someone imitated my review.) and was priced at $35, so I didn’t buy it. Following morning, after all, I wanted to buy it and visited the record shop, but the record was vanished. Long later, I saw a dream Parker plays Corcovado and I (…)

With the Beatles

I exactly remember the scene, in the biggning of fall in 1964, a beautiful girl with black long hair, slender legs and good scent walked down with quick steps through a gloomy corridor of the high school, holding an original UK version LP record of With the Beatles in her arms. But I never see her again.

In 1964, the Beatles were at the height of their worldwide popularity, I like their songs and listened most their songs all the time on the radio. But I was not enthusiastic Beatles fun, I passively listen to their song, and the songs are background music of my adolescent. I listened to entire LP of With the Beatles first time at the middle thirties. But I thought the music is not brilliant and impressive, yet the monochrome cover art of half-shadow portrait of four members is remarkably impressive.

The next year, I got a girlfriend, Sayoko, a classmate of the high school and a daughter of a wealthy family in Kobe. She was not interested in music of the Beatles, and her family listened easy listening such as Percy Faith Orchestra's Theme from a Summer Place.

A Sunday morning in the end of fall, I called for Sayoko to date with her. But she and her family except her older brother had went out. So I reluctantly waited for her at the living room, and I talked with her brother. He told he suffered a disease cuts off his memory, so he didn’t enter a university and spent mostly time at home. Then he asked me to read aloud Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Spinning Gears on my subtextbook of Japanese language. (Her absence is only my mistake, we appointed the next week Sunday.)

About 18 years later, I happened to meet Sayoko's older brother at Shibuya, Tokyo. We went to a café, and he told me that (…)

The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection

I've supported the Yakult Swallows since 1968, the era of the Sankei Atoms, when I moved Tokyo to enter an university. Because my manner is to support the team near a place I live. Swallows was weak, the Meiji Jingu Stadium was deserted, but I was fairly happy to lie down on the outfield lawn bleachers and to watch a baseball game while drinking beer. And I had been accustomed a situation of the world as “It also lost today.”, and learned a wisdom of “how to lose well” is different form “how to beat an opponent”. During this gloomy years, while watching games, I wrote down something like poetry about Swallows on notebooks. Then, in 1982, I published the poetry as The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection at my own expense, and printed 500 copies (…)

Carnaval

F-Asterisk is the most ugly woman I know, but her unusualness attracts certain people and she has a sophistication and a strong originality. A woman who can enjoy her ugliness may be happy. After a concert of a French violinist, I and F-Asterisk ate together at a restaurant, we talked about the ultimate piano music, chose Robert Schumann's Carnaval, and we made something like a club of Carnaval. We went around, I visited her elegant apartment in Daikanyama and talked about Carnaval and Schumann. She said Schumann can see either a human real face of devil with a mask of angel or a real face of angel with a mask of devil. After several months, I knew she was arrested by a swindling, from a TV news show (…)

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey

I met an old monkey when I took a trip to Gunma. When I took a hot spring of a cheap inn, the monkey entered the spring room, scrubbed my back and talked. He said he lived at a physics professor’s house in Gotenyama, Shinagawa, was educated by him, and he have worked at the inn for three years. On the night, I and the Shinagawa Monkey talked with drinking beer at a room of the inn. He said he was brought up like human being, so he can’t return to the society of monkey also he can’t go with human females he loves. So he stoled seven women’s names by his special skill and spiritual energy, and stocks their name as the love is equal to a fuel for continue to live. 5 years later, when I had a meeting with a editor woman around thirty, she forgot her name and she said she had lost her driving licence nearby Shinagawa (…)

First Person Singular

I rarely wear suit because there's no circumstance to wear suit. So I occasionally wear suit, put on a tie and leather shoes, and walk around my neighbourhood as a ritual. I feel a sense of guilt or an ethical incongruity to wear suit. At a good spring night, I wore a dark blue suit of Paul Smith and put on a fine paisley necktie of Ermenegildo Zegna and went to an unknown bar. At the bar, I drunk vodka gimlet and read a mystery novel. I looked at myself in a big mirror of the bar, I felt I may mistake the route of my life, but I really exist as a self of first person singular. After a while a woman sat down next to me said “What do you enjoy doing like this ?” and “This is to wear stylish clothes, to sit down alone at a bar, to drink gimlet and to be absorbed in reading” (…)

Product Details

First Person Singular (一人称単数)
Haruki Murakami
Bungeishunju, Tokyo, 18 July 2020
236 pages, JPY 1500
ISBN 9784163912394
Contents

On a Stone Pillow
Cream
Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova
With the Beatles
The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection
Carnaval
Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey
First Person Singular

First Person Singular: Stories
Haruki Murakami (Author), Philip Gabriel (Translator)
Knopf, New York City, New York, 6 April 2020
256 pages, $28.00
ISBN 9780593318072