Interestingly, this iteration is Murakami’s second run at telling this tale. “Was the Shinagawa monkey back to his old tricks?” Later, when an attractive friend of the narrator’s admits to sometimes forgetting her own name, he is disappointed. The narrator does wonder whether he has imagined the monkey, or, if he was real, whether he was lying about this ability to steal names. This talent, too, is unexpected but taken at face value. So he steals their names instead, possessing and treasuring them while leaving the unwitting women unable at times to recall their own names. The monkey, raised by humans and thus a perpetual outsider with both humans and apes, is attracted to women - who are, of course for him, unattainable. In “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” the narrator spends an evening talking and drinking with a monkey who serves as a bathhouse attendant at an old inn.Īrguably, this man devotes more time than do most Murakami protagonists to ruminating on the craziness of the situations the author throws at them, but while he’s surprised and curious that the monkey can talk, he’s not unduly flustered by it. But perhaps an even bigger boost to his international career came soon after, in 1990, with the publication of his first short story in the New Yorker, “TV People.” That one has been followed by roughly 30 more over the ensuing years his three most recent show up in this slender, eight-story collection.ĭavid Karashima, a later Murakami translator and author of Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, notes that, to get that first Murakami story into the New Yorker, it was translated by Alfred Birnbaum (who had done Murakami’s initial English translations), then edited by his first longtime editor, Elmer Luke, and then edited again by New Yorker fiction editor Linda Asher - neatly illustrating who all we’re reading when we’re reading just one Murakami story.įew of the author’s stories, long or short, are without a measure of magical realism, but in an unremarkable way, at least in the eyes of his narrators. Murakami’s first translated novel to be distributed in the U.S., A Wild Sheep Chase, hit our shores in 1989. The voice of his hapless Everyman - often young, awkward, and adrift within Murakami’s signature surrealist universe - is a steady narrative presence.

Nonetheless, my sense is that First Person Singular is not only the title of this story collection it appears also to be his point of view of choice throughout both his short and long fiction. I have dipped but a figurative toe in the comprehensive ocean of Haruki Murakami’s literary œuvre, a body of work that spans four decades and includes 14 novels and oodles of stories.

Murakami first person