When Rebecca Curtis read Haruki Murakami’s Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey on the New Yorker fiction podcast, she said something like no one inspires her to write more than Murakami.
I’ve loved the last few Murakami short stories I have read, so I picked up his recent collection, First Person Singular.
I think Murakami and Kafka are the two writers whose tone most precisely mirrors how I feel about the world in 2021. It’s surreal. Something’s off. There are cracks in the wall and you can’t tell if you should just keep moving forward or rethink your entire world model.