In 'With the Beatles,' the narrator reflects how a beautiful girl he passed just once in his high school hallway in 1964, clutching the eponymous album (released as Meet the Beatles in the States), somehow 'came to serve as a kind of gauge' against which he measured other women's appeal.

Their stories often begin with rambling memories of a baffling relationship from their youth. Most of his nameless narrators sound alike - self-effacing middle-aged writers who have always preferred Schumann and Charlie Parker to the Beatles, who provided the 'musical wallpaper' of their adolescence. Murakami's plainspoken short stories, like his more complex novels, raise existential questions about perception, memory, and the meaning of it all - though he's the opposite of heavy-handed, and rarely proposes answers. A bizarre, troubling run-in with a woman looking to pick a fight further heightens his sense of alienation. He stops for a cocktail, but is troubled that the reflection he sees in the mirror behind the bar 'seemed like a total stranger' it makes him feel like 'a first person singular' - someone experiencing his life choices at a remove, as if they were dictated by a narrator. But he sometimes enjoys dressing up in his fancy duds, 'just to see how they look.' One spring night, although he's feeling vaguely uneasy, as if 'somewhere I'd taken a wrong turn in life,' he decides to head out for a walk in a snappy suit and tie. 'I hardly ever wear suits,' the narrator begins. It takes its title - and overarching theme of disconnection - from the last story. The book, while emblematic of his short work in particular, doesn't break new ground like his recent novels, 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore, but it's an enjoyable read that goes down easily.

Cats are scarce, but a sophisticated talking monkey fills the feline gap.

The eight stories in First Person Singular, his first collection translated into English since Men Without Women (2017), are classic Murakami, filled with multiple recurrent obsessions - jazz, classical music, Beatles, baseball, and memories of perplexing young love. In book after book, his narrators (invariably male) draw us in with mystifying tales of odd experiences that even years later remain 'permanently unsolved, like some ancient riddle.' His fiction, whether long or short, highlights life's essential strangeness and unfathomability. Haruki Murakami is a master of the mesmerizing head-scratcher.

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