Stories

Stories

I have just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s most recent collection of short stories called First Person Singular. Every story inside thrilled me.

The unifying idea of the book is that each story is told in first person as if it is something that happened to the author. It doesn’t take long to understand that this is a work of fiction. I doubt that Murakami ever ran into a talking monkey at a steam bath.

If you like Murakami’s style, I’m confident you will love these stories. Each tale recounts very ordinary events that somehow go seriously off the rails. That is the joy of Murakami. His short stories and novels and even his writing style are deceptively pedestrian. Everything is commonplace and familiar, until it isn’t.

There are times in Murakami’s work that the reader must wonder what the point of some of his writing is. I’m sure his answer would be that the story means anything you would like it to. Stories are a glimpse into the mind of the writer and into the lives of the characters inside.

I’m always curious to see what people on Goodreads have to say about books I have strong feelings about. It sometimes surprises me that books I feel are weak get good reviews. I have no problem with that; if a writer can reach a reader, they have succeeded. It isn’t my place to tell people that a book they like isn’t good.

When I looked up the reviews for First Person Singular, I was amazed at how many negative reviews the book got. The bad reviewers generally had two complaints about the book.

The first concern was that Murakami is sexist. I’ve heard this complaint before and seen Murakami’s response. In interviews he makes it clear that he knows that he doesn’t understand much of what it is like to be a woman. As an artist he doesn’t really care about what others think of his ideas. He acknowledges that he might be wrong about some things, but all he can write about is what he sees in the world.

One reviewer said they loved the stories and then threw down the book at the story that began with “she was the ugliest woman I had ever seen.” My reaction to this line was that it was more a comment on the narrator than the woman. In the story the narrator ends up becoming close friends with the woman over her love of a particular piano piece. In the end he finds out she’s a drug dealer.

This story is about so much more than judging women on their appearance. On one level it’s about how everyone judges others by outward characteristics like their appearance and music appreciation, but in the end these judgements have nothing to do with who people really are.

The other main concern reviewers had was that the stories were unbelievable. Because the stories are told in first person, they assumed that the author is saying all these events must have actually happened. One reviewer suggested that Murakami must have been on drugs when he wrote about a talking monkey.

I think these two responses show a similar misunderstanding of what stories are. All writing is fiction. Even when we try to tell the absolute truth, our writing is coloured by our view of the world.

Too many people seem to think that books and stories need to reflect the world that the reader understands. Stories can be about things that have never happened, and they can be about characters who do things that few of us would find acceptable. Despicable characters often say terrible things to show the reader how bad these characters are.

If we demand that stories only have palatable plots and use words we are comfortable with we run the risk of not understanding much of the world.