A Murakami-esque short story It was the most traumatic night of my young life. A chilling experience for a thirteen-year-old girl. I’d always been a light sleeper but I knew it wasn’t the wind or an earthquake tremor that woke me in the wee hours of the morning. It must’ve been two or three o’clock. More…
Every December, a Kyoto-based kanji organization chooses a kanji that best represents the feeling of the past 12 months. For 2018 the winner was 災, which indicates “disaster.” Last year Mother Nature walloped Japan with floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and a record-breaking heatwave, all of them proving fatal. As if that weren’t enough, there was recently a More…
From her flight bag Chiharu Kobayashi drew out a Chanel cosmetic purse and popped its clasp. In front of the mirror she touched up her lashes, eyebrows, then her lips. She examined her teeth and made a mental note to pick up a bottle of Hibiki 17-year in Dubai before the onward leg to More…
A story in the style of Murakami Haruki and his English translators One late-autumn Sunday morning when I set out into the back garden wielding the hedge trimmers, I found the well was gone. It wasn’t that I’d particularly liked the well when it had been there—it hadn’t provided us with delicious ice-cold water in More…
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