THE PITCH of the staircase was steep and the treads narrow. There were three stories above the ground floor, and she took him all the way to the top. It got darker and spookier as they climbed. The walls on either side of the stairs were hung with hundreds of framed portraits of her father, carefully fit together like tiles to cover every inch of ( Read more... )

The only reliable boy who got to know Lux during that time was Trip Fontaine, but his sense of honor kept us in the dark for years. Only eighteen months before the suicides, Trip Fontaine had emerged from baby fat to the delight of girls and women alike. Because we had known him as a pudgy boy whose teeth slanted out of his open, trolling mouth ( Read more... )

Translated by Philip Gabriel.

The "I" here, you should know, means me, Haruki Murakami, the author of this story. Mostly this is a third-person narrative, but here at the beginning the narrator does make an appearance. Just like in an old-fashioned play where the narrator stands before the curtain, delivers a prologue, then bows out. I appreciate ( Read more... )