Memoir or fiction?: Murakami returns with a mind-bending new collection of short stories

Murakami's new book – eight stories united by their first-person narration – is filled with male characters he might have been; might actually be. Photo: Handout

Haruki Murakami has a new collection of stories - First Person Singular -told in the first person by an unnamed older man obsessed with baseball, music, and the porous borders between memory, reality and dreams.

He may describe himself as a "bland, run-of-the-mill guy, ” as in the story Cream – about a young man’s encounter with an ageing mystic – but Murakami Man is more like a walking encyclopaedia who has a problem with women – mainly, that he can’t seem to get past their physical appearance.