Haruki Murakami, OxyContin and Other Letters to the Editor
Credit.Jim Stoten
To the Editor: I really appreciated David Means’s review of Haruki Murakami’s new story collection, “First Person Singular” (April 25). Means is a good guide to discovering and appreciating Murakami’s oeuvre. And if you’ve never read any of it until now, this pithy collection is a good entry. But you either get Haruki Murakami or you don’t. And if you don’t like this one, you won’t like anything else he wrote either.
Murakami is that rare, once-in-a-generation writer who manages to either completely engross you in his world, at least in his abstract and arcane (but quite openly modern) musings on it, or to completely turn you off from turning even another page in any of his books. To me, “First Person Singular” was an opportunity to immerse myself yet again into his deftly woven magic.