Haruki Murakami is ideally suited for an era in which alternative facts, deep fakes and outright lies seem to be hastening societal collapse. The writer has long been celebrated for his subversive distortions of the truth and playful skewering of reality. First Person Singular, Murakami’s new collection of short stories and essays, includes a riff on Charlie Parker. The extremely meta exercise concerns a narrator who encounters the Kansas City icon years after his satirical review of a nonexistent bossa nova album was published in a Japanese journal. The prank detailed in Murakami’s “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova” has tangible and spiritual ramifications. Analogous with Parker’s daring personality and in keeping the mythology surrounding Bird, the story holds particular appeal to Parker devotees harboring devotional predilections. The strangeness doesn’t end there. The Polish musician Milosz Konarski oversaw the creation of the poker-faced album Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova (what if) as an homage to Murakami’s work. What does it all mean? Don’t ask the author. Murakami writes in “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” a similarly astounding story in First Person Singular: “Theme? Can’t say there is one.”
Fiction Review: Haruki Murakami’s “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova”
Original image of First Person Singular by Plastic Sax.