A review by alexandr1ne
First Person Singular, by Haruki Murakami

1.0

Yeah, I really didn't like this. I didn't hate With The Beatles or Shinagawa Monkey, but whatever personal enjoyment could have been gleaned from those was undercut for me by how terrible everything else was. Also, the way Murakami writes about women in this anthology is gross. Like, I had a visceral reaction to it. Men get to be people, while women - and their relationship to both the narrative and the narrator - are defined entirely by what they look like. And if "what they look like" happens to be "unattractive", you can bet you will be hearing about it, in excruciating detail. If I truly believed every man's internal monologue was like this, I would have [redacted] by now, rather than just fantasizing about it. Disappointing, but I will persevere with his other works regardless, as I've heard such good things and the others I've read/started reading haven't been like this at all.