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Last time, we looked at the end of Kino and the way Kino the character transforms, driven to an extreme point by the experience of having his desolated heart trying to physically confront him. It is a painful transformation the story describes; it’s not as if, in the end, Kino becomes supremely happy running his little bar and listening to American jazz records, all conflicts settled. No, he winds up cowering in a bed in a seedy hotel. He’s in pain but it’s genuine pain, unl

When we last left Kino, he’d just had the encounter with the woman burned by cigarettes and was shown feeling ambivalently about her. Ambivalent—please note that word as it will reoccur. The next scene after a paragraph break concerns Kino’s now ex-wife coming to the bar at her initiative after the divorce has been finalized. The couple has a glass of wine, and then, “The cat padded over and, surprisingly, leaped into Kino’s lap.” This is an unusual occurrence as the cat is g

Kino’s bar is a modest success. We learn more about “the man.” “My name is Kamita,” he said. It’s written with the characters for “god” —kami—and “field” —“god’s field,” as you might expect. It’s pronounced “Kamita.” The first two paragraphs of this next section are in imperfect time that collapses four months. Then we have a specific scene. While Mr. Kamita is at the bar, two guys come in to drink expensive wine. Kino thinks they may be yakuza, gangsters. They cause a distur

This week, a new story, Kino, a long short story written by Haruki Murakami. An English version of Kino first appeared in The New Yorker in February, 2015 and was subsequently included in his collection Men Without Women, published by Knopf in 2017. Kino was first published in Japanese in 2014. Readers may remember a similar process occurred with Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, Casting Shadows—a story written originally in a different language and translated to English, then published