The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Murakami, Haruki. First Person Singular. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

First Person Singular is a collection of eight short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

In “Cream,” an unnamed narrator recalls a strange event that occurred when he was 18 years old. He received an invitation to a piano recital from a girl with whom he once took lessons. Feeling lonely and despondent after failing his university entrance exam, he decided to attend the recital. However, when he arrived, the hall and neighborhood where it was being held were completely empty. Feeling confused and anxious, he walked to a park and sat on a bench. Soon after, he was joined by an old man, who asked him to imagine a “circle with many centers” but “no circumference” (18). The narrator told him it was difficult to imagine such a thing, and the man replied that “There's nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily” (20). This conversation comforted the narrator and resonated with him for many years.

In “On a Stone Pillow,” an unnamed narrator recalls spending the night with a woman he worked with when he was a sophomore in college. They barely knew one another, and the woman told the narrator she might call out another man's name during sex. She explained that she was in love with the other man, but he did not love her back. The narrator wondered why she maintained a sexual relationship with this man who was clearly using her. In the morning, she mentioned she wrote a book of tanka poems and told the narrator she would send him a copy. She did, and he found the poems fascinating. In the present, he wonders why he continues to think of this woman and her poems so long after this incident occurred.

In “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” an unnamed narrator remembers writing an article for his college literary magazine about a jazz album that did not exist. The album was called Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, and he explains that it could not have existed because Parker died in 1955 and bossa nova did not emerge as a popular music genre until 1962. He forgot about the article, until 15 years later when he was in a record store in New York City and found an album called Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, featuring the exact tracklist he had imagined. When he came back to purchase the album the next day, it was gone. Years later, the narrator had a dream in which Parker visited him and thanked him, as he believed the fictitious album had given him a chance to live on and play music again.

In “With the Beatles,” an unnamed narrator recalls seeing a girl in the hallway of his high school clutching a Beatles record to her chest. This image stayed with the narrator for years as a symbol of desire and yearning. Shortly after seeing the girl in the hallway, the narrator got his first girlfriend, who was called Sayoko. One day, he went to Sayoko's house to meet her for a date but she was not home. He spent the afternoon talking to her brother, who was suffering from a genetic condition that affected his memory. Eighteen years later he ran into Sayoko's brother in Tokyo. Sayoko's brother told him that Sayoko had died by suicide, and both men contemplated how little they had known or understood her.

In “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” an unnamed narrator remembers visiting a small inn located in Japan's Gunma Prefecture. While bathing in the inn's hot spring, he met a talking monkey who worked there. The monkey explained that he had been taken in and taught human speech by a professor who lived in Shinagawa. After he was forcibly driven out of Shinagawa, he lived briefly at the monkey park in Takasakiyama, but he was bullied by the other monkeys. The monkey further noted that he was only attracted to human women, and since he could not have romantic relationships with them, he stole their names. He did this by stealing their IDs and concentrating on the names written there. However, he said he had ceased doing this since coming to the inn. Some time later, the narrator was back home in Tokyo and having lunch with a female colleague when she suddenly forgot her own name. He wondered if the Shinagawa monkey had stolen it.

In “Carnaval,” an unnamed narrator describes his brief friendship with a woman he calls F*. He explains that F* was one of the ugliest women he had ever known, but that she was charismatic and intelligent, and the two shared a common love for composer Robert Schumann's piece Carnaval. They spent considerable time together listening to different recordings of the piece. Eventually, he lost contact with F*, and he later saw her on the news being arrested for investment fraud with her husband. He was just as surprised to discover that she had a handsome husband as he was to learn she was a criminal.

“The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” is an autobiographical story. Murakami reflects on his lifelong love of baseball, and particularly the team he has followed ever since moving to Tokyo, the Yakult Swallows. The team had a long history of losing when he began going to their games, but he did not mind, as he simply enjoyed the experience of attending a game. He also reflects on his relationship with his father, as well as his writing career. The story is named after a collection of poetry Murakami self-published. All of the poems in the book were written at baseball games and feature baseball-related themes. At the end of the story, Murakami compares himself as a novelist to the dark beer vendor at a baseball game, suggesting that both offer products that do not appeal to a large demographic.

In “First Person Singular,” an unnamed narrator explains that he rarely wears a suit in his day-to-day life, so he sometimes puts one on just to see how it looks on him. One evening, he put on a suit and felt a strange tinge of remorse. He went out to a bar where he was confronted by a woman he had never met before. She mistook him for another man, someone who had done something cruel to a friend of hers years earlier. The narrator was deeply disturbed by her accusations, and when he left the bar, he hallucinated that he saw snakes in the trees and people exhaling noxious fumes.