On Saturday 13th the collection «Prima persona singolare» will be on sale. Eight stories by the Japanese author that contain his world: women, music, baseball, talking animals
If by chance, by choice (but you can always change course), for a thousand reasons in life you never happened to read a book of Murakami Haruki and – providentially – if you want to recover, here, you could start with this book of 145 pages, First person singular. Because in eight short stories – which are fabulous – there is everything you need to know about the most famous Japanese writer in the world: his characters (clumsy, silent, lonely men; enigmatic and seductive women), his passions (music, baseball), the magic that sneaks into colorless existences and illuminates them, as when the talking monkey confesses in a spa inn while sipping an ice cold beer.
Murakami in purity. Which tells and tells itself. In a concentration of oneself that, starting from the ego, takes unexpected directions, always poised between the memoir, the fable, the diary, the wildest fiction, the mystery. Worlds that we find in the eight tales of First person singular, from Saturday 13 August on newsstands with the Corriere della Sera (in collaboration with Einaudi) in the translation by Antonietta Pastore. Here then are the stages of this summa, a Murakamian essence to be read and reread, in a game of revelations and masks, of lived and dreamed experience, of mirrors that multiply and deform images, of incomprehensible and elusive women.
It is precisely a girl – “she must have been around twenty-five” – to drag the reader into a whirlwind of memories in the story that opens the collection, On a stone cushion. Mysterious, she shouts the name of another man while she is in bed with the protagonist (at the time) 19 years old: «I hurried to put the towel between her teeth, what else could I do? She had very strong teeth. ‘ An anatomical detail, sex, a disturbing woman who writes poetry, the fleeting encounters made by boys who, however, mark forever (as in the second story, The cream of life): welcome at board.
The love of an evening. Or the one that blew up (and ended up) at school one morning for the student holding the record With the Beatles (we are in 1964): «The fluttering skirt seemed to be in a hurry. It was there that I met her, in that badly lit corridor of the old school building (…) She was beautiful. At least, it seemed wonderful to me. She is not very tall, long hair, slender legs, and a very good perfume ».Master of description
Murakami. Of women, above all. Those that make his heart beat. Those ugly but tremendously seductive like the protagonist of the story Carnaval. The sweet and sad ones like Sayoko (Murakami delivered memorable female figures to readers, from Aomame’s 1Q84 a Naoko e Midori di Norwegian Wood).
Girls, wives, lovers in front of which the author is always a little bewildered. Or maybe not, it’s not him: we will never be sure that the young man of On a stone cushion either 19 year old Haruki, or Kyoto born Murakami in Poetic anthology for the Yakult Swallows be the writer himself.
There are no defined limits. Between the author and his alter egos, but also between reality and fantasywhich Murakami readers are used to (from In the sign of the sheep a The strange libraryyes Kafka on the beach a The assassination of the Commendatore). And then it can happen to meet – as if it were absolutely normal – a romantic monkey and to argue with her about love and classical music, Bruckner and Strauss, in the bathroom of a hotel, eating rice crackers and dried cuttlefish and drinking. two bottles of ‘Sapporo’ (well-prepared beer and cocktails often appear in the writer’s works).
Or to find in a New York shop a record that never existed by Charlie Parker, the jazz legend who then, revived, appears in a dream (but will it really be a dream?) To the narrator of the story Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova. The plans alternate and overturn. Murakami plays with his themes and his existence. He looks back, above all. The author born in 1949 feels the weight of time, «my dreams as a boy have died away. And when dreams die, in a sense it is even sadder for a person than not actually dying. Sometimes it seems really unfair to me. ‘
There is a deep nostalgia for a condition, youth
where everything is still possible: «Our body cannot go back, moment by moment it advances towards decay. We close our eyes for a moment, and when we open them again, we realize that many things – things that have a name and things that don’t – have already disappeared. They were blown away by the wind in the middle of the night, all of them, without a trace. Only fleeting memories remain ».
A baseball game seen with his father (the relationship with the parent is also addressed in Abandoning a cat and is always tinged with regret), a masterpiece by Schumann, the famous Carnaval in which the masks appear “and what lies beneath »: Memory – like music – becomes a companion and medicine. While “many other things and words have been lost, pulverized”, Murakami tries to fix images and conversations. He feels the need – the urgency – to keep a trace of it. And she does it with her unmistakable trait, bypassing the real dimension and, at the same time, telling moments of ordinary life.
Like when in the last story, which gives the collection its title, he lets himself be mistreated by a stranger in a bar on a spring evening. Yet, whether they are magical elements, bizarre women, mild days that end with a layer of ash on the sidewalks and an icy air, Murakami does not give up the warmth of confession. He bares himself even when he unleashes the imagination – after all he has accustomed us to his talking animals (cats, sheep, monkeys), to skies with two moons, to wells from which anyone can appear. He reveals himself without giving up his poetics: «Now I would like to talk about a woman. Not that I know much about her “…
The book on newsstands
“It was in a small spa inn in M ***, Gunma prefecture, that I met that old monkey.” The primate speaks and reveals himself but it is above all the author, Murakami Haruki, who tells himself in the eight stories (and “Confession of a monkey by Shinagawa” is one of them) of “First person singular”, for the first time on newsstands with the “Corriere della Sera” from 13 August, in the translation by Antonietta Pastore. The volume comes out in collaboration with Einaudi (the publisher who publishes all of Murakami’s works) and will remain on sale for a month at the price of € 9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper (the graphic design of the cover is by XxY studio). Murakami Haruki, master of contemporary Japanese fiction, was born in Kyoto on January 12, 1949. He made his debut in fiction in 1979 with “Listen to the song of the wind” (with which he obtained the Gunzo prize) and the following year, with “The pinball machine from 1973 ». Since then, a young lover of American music and literature, owner of a jazz bar, the now legendary “Peter Cat” (closed in 1981), has never stopped writing, collecting a series of international hits translated into fifty languages. Among these we remember “Norwegian Wood”, from 1987, arrived in Italy in 1993, “Kafka on the beach” (2002, in Italy 2008), “1Q84” (2009, in Italy 2011): novels with a style that combines Western culture and oriental, pop atmospheres and Japanese intimism. In addition to his work as a narrator and essayist, Murakami has combined the work of translation by making the works of Raymond Carver known in Japan, as well as numerous short stories and novels by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Tim O’Brien, John Irving.
August 11, 2022 (change August 11, 2022 | 21:09)
© Time.News