FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

A new collection of stories from the master of the strange, enigmatic twist of plot.

“Your brain is made to think about difficult things.” So concludes the narrator of "Cream," the first story in this gathering, an allusion to the phrase crème de la crème and not the English rock band. In that narrator’s case, the cream rises when you finally understand something you have not comprehended before, while “the rest is boring and worthless.” That realization comes after an old classmate invites him to a piano recital at the vertiginous top of a tall mountain, where he is subjected to both a Christian harangue and a metaphysical puzzle. Music is never far from a Murakami yarn, though always with an unexpected turn: Charlie Parker comes in a dream to tell one young man that death is pretty boring and meaningless, saying, “What’s existed until then suddenly and completely vanishes.” It’s a righteous sentiment, but the young man’s moral flaw was not to consider what existed but instead to write a faux record review for a college magazine about a Parker album that never did, one pairing him with Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. When his editor learns the truth and objects to the chicanery, the young man rationalizes his invention: “I didn’t actually fool him, but merely omitted a detailed explanation.” Closer to Murakami’s heart still are his beloved Fab Four, whose album With the Beatles an ethereal young woman clutches to her chest, giving the narrator a madeleine for the rest of his life. Murakami’s characters are typically flat of affect, protesting their ugliness and ordinariness, and puzzled or frightened by things as they are. But most are also philosophical even about those ordinary things, as is the narrator of that fine Beatles-tinged tale, who ponders why it is that pop songs are important and informative in youth, when our lives are happiest: “Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.”

An essential addition to any Murakami fan’s library.