Fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Yasunari Kawabata, and Louise Erdrich

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This is what happened.  An unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.  
        This so-called lover bounced between two households, his mother's and his wife's, and he had an overripe daughter of fourteen to consider as well.  About his work at the laboratory he constantly fretted but would brag to anyone who listened about the imminent promotion that never materialized.  The insatiable appetite he displayed at office parties, where he stuffed himself, was the result of an undiagnosed diabetes that enslaved him to thirst and hunger and lacquered him with pasty skin, thick glasses, and dandruff.  A fat, balding man-child of forty-two with a dead-end job and ruined health--this was the treasure our unmarried thirtysomething brought to her apartment for a night of love. . . . 
--From There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, a collection by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, selected and translated from the Russian by Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2013).

Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony.  He was already late.
        He received an announcement whenever Kurimoto Chikako offered tea at the inner cottage of the Engakuji.  He had not once gone since his father's death, however.  He thought of the announcements as no more than formal gestures in memory of his father.  
        This time there had been a postscript: she wanted him to meet a young lady to whom she was giving tea lessons.
        As he read it, Kikuji thought of Chikako's birthmark.  
        Had he been eight, perhaps, or nine?  He had been taken by his father to visit Chikako, and they had found her in the breakfast room. . . . 
--From Thousand Cranes, a short novel by Yasunari Kawabata, originally published in Japanese as Sembazuru, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker, with drawings by Fumi Komatsu (Wideview/Perigee, G. P. Putnam's Sons/The Putnam Publishing Group, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1959).

He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents.  With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked.  Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark.  At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white.  Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe in my grandfather's bedroom.  He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other.  This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water. . . .   
--From "Nero," a short story by Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker (May 7, 2012), pp. 60-67.