RaveEvening Standard (UK)First Person Singular is a patch of intense variety and colour, in which a typical Murakami narrator ponders his way through ordinary situations of love, memory and alienation punctuated by surreal moments ... Translated by the award-winning Philip Gabriel, the stories play on perennial Murakami themes: chance encounters, the clash of magic and mundanity and the power of memory ... the voice and experiences of Murakami, who grew up in an Americanised, baseball-loving, jazzy Japanese society, shine through ... 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. That, as well as the extended descriptions of banality and the long winding metaphors that paint pictures like little else.
