murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The tram snaked its way
through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on
at stops along the way, but the three old women went on talking
intently about something, huddled together face-to-face.
I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori's map down a broad
street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way
seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings
with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs.
Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been
spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the
places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or
repaired in places, and it was these additions that tended to look
shabbier than the old buildings themselves.
The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the original
residents had become fed up with the cars, the filthy air, the noise and
high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap flats and
company apartments
and hard-to-sell shops and a few stubborn people who clung to old
family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as though
wrapped in a haze of exhaust fumes.
Ten minutes' walk down this street brought me to a corner petrol
station, where I turned right into a small block of shops, in the middle
of which hung the sign for the Kobayashi Bookshop. True, it was not
a big shop, but neither was it as small as Midori's description had led
me to believe. It was just a typical neighbourhood bookshop, the same
kind I used to run to on the very day the boys' comics came out. A
nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place.
The whole front of the shop was sealed off by a big, rolldown metal
shutter inscribed with a magazine advertisement:
"WEEKLY BUNSHUN SOLD HERE THURSDAYS". I still had 15
minutes before noon, but I didn't want to kill time wandering through
the block with a handful of daffodils, so I pressed the doorbell beside
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