a new haruki murakami story

The New Yorker has published a new story, "Samsa in Love," by Haruki Murakami.

Read it here.

memory 101

1 memory creates fiction, said orphan.

A non-verbal memory of lost time, said elf.

The angry one thought it’d be her. She spat angry words and gestures. The fury of a woman scorned. Accept loss forever. He paid mama. They cycled back. They ate fish, vegetables and rice and went to bed. For hours. Normally her customers were 15 minute quickie jobs. He slowed her down. Take our time. She was flat and flat on her back. She started relaxing. No hurry, sweet thing. After awhile she’d say, boom-boom?

Her vocabulary was extensive.

Relax, take it easy. 24, no father, a brother in Malaysia and a mother north of a capital letter. 

You are a monkey, she said curling up soft and warm. She used imaginary scissors to cut off his instrument of mass destruction. 

Yes, she said, I will eat you alive tonight while rain assaults the tin roof through fractured eroding leaves of lost time.

Tiger Voice

Greetings,

Tell me about your future
all laid out in perfect reconciliations 
of existence
overflowing with play, discoveries, exploring your labyrinth
rapacious fluidity,
exercising complexity science
where imagination tells the truth
these days before Chinese New Year
and Mr. Murakami sighs,

"Memory is like fiction, or else it's fiction 
that is like memory. Human existence in absurd activities. 
Right and wrong drop out of the picture. Memory takes over and fiction is born.
It is a perpetual motion machine, tottering through the world,
trailing an unbroken thread over the ground."

It is now the Year of the Tiger
believing their strength, solitary nature, nocturnal way,
running to survive
swimming in deep water
leading you into deep forests
when a shadow spirit named The Other
whispers
"It's time to go, it's time to go."

Metta.