Short fiction by Haruki Murakami

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A mother and her son, Americans, were staying in the unit next door to my wife and me.  They seemed to have settled in long before we arrived.  The mother was around sixty, the son close to our age, twenty-eight or twenty-nine.  They resembled each other more than any mother and son I'd ever seen--both with identical long, narrow faces, broad foreheads, tightly set lips.  The mother was tall, her posture erect, her movements always alert and brisk.  The son seemed tall, too, but you really couldn't say for sure, as he was confined to a wheelchair.  Invariably, his mother was behind him, pushing the chair.  
--From "Hunting Knife," a short story by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories (Vintage, 2007), pp. 84-99.  First published in The New Yorker (November 17, 2003).

Taking the occasional sip of bitter coffee, I slowly read the article.  I'd read a few lines to myself, mull over how to put it into Japanese, then translate aloud.  A few bees popped up from somewhere to lick the jam that a previous customer had spilled on the table.  They spent a moment lapping it up, then, as if suddenly remembering something, flew into the air with a ceremonious buzz, circled the table a couple of times, and then--again as if something had jogged their memory--settled once more on the tabletop.  After I had finished reading the whole article, Izumi sat there, unmoving, elbows resting on the table.  She tented the tips of the fingers of her right hand with the tips of her fingers of her left.  
--From "Man-Eating Cats," a short story by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories (Vintage, 2007), pp. 112-130.  First published in The New Yorker (December 4, 2000).    

Every morning, [my roommate] was up at six on the dot, the national anthem his alarm clock.  So I guess the flag-raising wasn't a complete waste.  He dressed and went to wash up, taking an incredibly long time to finish.  Made me wonder sometimes if he wasn't taking each tooth out and brushing them individually.  Back in the room he smoothed out his towel, hung it on a hanger, and put his toothbrush and soap back on the shelf.  Then he'd switch on the radio and start exercising to the morning exercise program.  
        I was pretty much a night owl, and a heavy sleeper, so when he started up I was usually dead to the world.  When he got to the part where he began to leap up and down, I'd bolt out of bed.  Every time he jumped up--and believe me he jumped really high--my head would bounce three inches off the pillow.  Try sleeping through that.  
        "I'm really sorry," I said on the fourth day of this, "but I wonder if you could do your exercises on the roof or something.  It wakes me up."
        "I can't," he replied.  "If I do it there, the people on the third floor will complain.  This is the first floor, so there isn't anyone below us." 
        "Well, how about doing it in the courtyard?"
        "No way.  I don't have a transistor radio so I wouldn't be able to hear the music.  You can't expect me to do my exercises without music." 
        His radio was the kind you had to plug in.  I could have lent him my transistor, but it only picked up FM stations.
        "Well, at least could you turn the music down and stop jumping?  The whole room shakes.  I don't want to complain or anything, but . . ."
        "Jumping?"  He seemed surprised.  "What do you mean, j-jumping?"  
        "You know, that part where you bounce up and down."
        "What are you talking about?"
        I could feel a headache coming on.  
--From "Firefly," a short story by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories (Vintage, 2007), pp. 226-248.  First published in the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Vintage, 2012).    

Junpei left the house at eighteen when he went to college in Tokyo, and he became involved with several women, one of whom "had real meaning" for him.  He knew this with absolute certainty at the time, and he is just as certain of it now.  Before he could express his feelings in concrete form, however (by nature, it took him longer than most people to put things into concrete form), she married his best friend, and since then she has become a mother.  For the time being, therefore, she had to be eliminated from the list of possibilities that life had to offer Junpei.  He had to harden his heart and sweep her from his mind, as a result of which the number of women remaining who could have "real meaning" in his life--if he was going to accept his father's theory at face value--was reduced to two.  
--From "The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day," a short story by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin, published in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories (Vintage, 2007), pp. 312-332.  First published in The New Yorker (September 26, 2005).