National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly-funded American news organization, held an interview with the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami about his new collection of stories, First Person Singular. In this collection, Murakami writes in the first-person singular “I” perspective.
Murakami said, "There's a long tradition in modern Japanese literature of the autobiographical, so-called I-novel, the idea that sincerity lies in honestly and openly writing about your life, making a kind of self-confession. I'm opposed to that idea and wanted to create my own 'first personal singular' writing."
Murakami goes on to explain that he often writes characters based on his personal experiences and rewrites them multiple times to the point that the experiences become fictional and hard to recognize from his own life.
Like a lot of his other works, this new collection uses magical realism, a literary device in which magical and surreal things occur and characters accept them as completely normal.
