Short side trips along the way.” However, as he notes, “these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. Some of these experiences, as the narrator notes in “Carnaval,” are “nothing more than … minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Often, in the middle of a story, a memory will trigger another memory, through a sort of mnemonic leap the result can be like a confusingly drawn map that means more to the creator than the reader.

In this collection, an older narrator goes sifting through the events of his past, some of them surreal and unexplainable. These elements are certainly on display in his new story collection, First Person Singular, but the dominant mode here is memory. There is his immense popularity, of course, but also the strange radiance of his work and his tendency to present mysteries or puzzles with no solutions. One begins a new Haruki Murakami book with high expectations. That doesn’t keep him from stealing the name of his love interests though.First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel In Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey, the monkey contemplates love as he gives the author a body scrub and tells him over a beer that he values the memory of having loved. With the Beatles is a story about fleeting memories and a critical message disappearing. In On a Stone Pillow you read how an object has the power to bring back memories and in Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova a fantasy becomes a dreamlike reality. I graciously applied this wisdom as I wondered why I had to read the story The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. You don’t have to worry about unexplained, illogical events it’s not about the principle or the intention.

This story ends with the life lesson that you don’t always need to know what is happening or what something is about. You don’t have to agree with me, but that’s the meaning it has for me. Instead, we are treated to a meditation on circles: what does it mean when a circle has many centers but no circumference? I don’t know what Murakami (or the rest of the world) means by this, but to me it seems like all people are at the center of their own borderless lives and as such there are many centers, just as Murakami himself is at the center of this book. The first story, Cream, goes a step further by not even letting the supposed encounter happen.

First person singular stories