The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Woman
Unnamed writer is cooking at his home when he gets a strange call from an unfamiliar woman asking for ten minutes to settle something. He tells her he is cooking and she promises to call soon. He then receives another call from his wife who offers him a part-time job of editing poetry in a school newspaper, which he refuses since he has a law degree. He is having a quarter-life crisis and has left his job. He receives another call from the woman who tries to have a sex conversation with him, but he disconnects the call. He then goes to look for his wife’s runaway cat, and ends up talking to a girl who tells him of her homicidal desires as he falls asleep. He gets back to his house, and finds his wife tired and forlorn. She accuses him of killing the cat and the phone rings which none of them answer.
The Second Bakery Attack
Unnamed narrator and his wife wake up from extraordinary hunger pangs to find they have nothing to eat in their house. The narrator begins to tell her of the time he and a friend attacked a bakery for bread, but the owner convinced them to listen to some music and then take the bread. His wife says that his inability to rob that bakery has resulted in the hunger that is affecting both of them. She asks him to rob another bakery, and they end up robbing a McDonald’s store completing the attack.
The Kangaroo Communique
Narrator handles complaints at a departmental store, and after coming across a letter decides to answer it using a tape recorder. He expresses a familiarity with the complainant to a point where he expresses sexual feelings for the complainant, and declares his dissatisfaction with life.
On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
Narrator sees a girl and realizes she is 100% perfect for him. He is unable to say anything to her out of nervousness and fantasizes that the two had met fourteen years ago and fell in love but decided to test their love by staying apart to see if fate would bring them together. Both fall and sick and lose memory, when they finally meet they have a sense of recognition but no memory to know each other.
Sleep
Narrator lives a mundane monotonous life with her husband and son. She had an episode of insomnia in her teenage years. She experiences an attack of sleep paralysis one day, and can’t sleep thereafter without this affecting her health or concentration. She begins to read books during this time or go out on drives. She begins to have a secret life where she used this time to do as she pleases. She realizes how monotonous her life is. As she goes on a drive and is thinking absent-mindedly, two men attack her trying to tip her car over. The story ends with an ambiguous ending, where she can’t concentrate on her response as she feared the lack of sleep would do.
The Fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler’s Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds
The narrator describes his mundane week as major events from history to add some attraction to his mundane life. He is waiting for his girlfriend to come. As he waits, he notices the bright cloudless day as stupendous as the Roman Empire transformed into a storm. He gets a call which is disrupted with very loud winds which he calls as the 1881 Indian Uprising and remembers watching a movie yesterday about Hitler’s Invasion of Poland.
Lederhosen
Narrator is told the story of how the parents of his wife’s friend divorced over a pair of Lederhosen shorts from Germany. Her mother had been invited by her sister to visit her in Germany from where her father had asked her to get him Lederhosen shorts. As part of the store policy, she is told that they will sell shorts only to the person who wanted to wear them. She finds a man having her husband’s physique and while he is being fitted, she realizes how much she is disgusted by him and decides to divorce him.
Barn Burning
Narrator meets a girl who is learning pantomiming and strikes a fancy. She works as a part-time model and is mostly supported by a string of boyfriends. She inherits some money when her father dies and uses it to have a trip to Algeria. She returns with a boyfriend. One day, both of them visit the narrator and after having a heavy lunch, booze and marijuana, the boyfriend tells him that he likes to burn barns. Intrigued, the narrator looks for barns near his house as he had described but nothing happens. He asks him is he had burned the barn indeed; which he says he has. He also says that he can’t find her that she had seemed to disappear.
The Little Green Monster
The narrator is looking at a tree in her garden, when she realizes that a scaly creature is clawing itself out of earth. It enters her house expressing his love, but the narrator being repulsed by it, is disgusted. She realizes that the creature can hear her thoughts and while she doesn’t like this thought, she uses it to her advantage by thinking of horrid ways to torture it till it disappeared.
Family Affair
The narrator and his sister live together in Tokyo. She wants him to meet a guy she likes but hates her. Both of them are planning to get married. They have a lot of differences in their opinions. The narrator realizes that he can’t think of his sister as his sister only from now. Both of them are somewhat scared and excited with the future.
A window
Narrator describes an experience where he was employed a company that taught letter-writing. He was quite popular among the students and realized that most of his students wrote to him simply for company. He shared a personal and heart-felt communication with them. As he left the company, he went to one of his students to eat a hamburger, and despite the sexual tension the two don’t sleep. He can’t remember her or the details of her letters, since there were too many students and too many letters, but he thought of her hamburger often.
TV People
The narrator notices 3 men carrying and installing a TV in his house without any comment. He finds it strange since he didn’t order it, yet doesn’t say a word. His wife seems oblivious, even though it is big enough to get noticed. HE notices same people in his office installing same TV. He asks a colleague about it, who talks happily till this question and leaves without an answer. That day, his wife doesn’t return and one of the men materialize from TV telling him that they are building a plane. After this conversation, he realizes that his own body is getting transformed to the small structure of the TV people.
A Slow Boat to China
Narrator describes how he met the first three Chinese people in his life. First was an invigilator at a Chinese School where he went to write exams. The second was a girl with whom he worked. Both were attracted to each other, but after a misunderstanding the girl misses her curfew and he loses her number never to see her again. He met the third Chinese person in high school who came looking for him in his late twenties. He had been selling encyclopedias and the narrator realizes that slowly China is taking over Japan.
The Dancing Dwarf
The narrator works at a factory where they make real elephants. He has a dream about a dancing dwarf who entrances him. He asks about it to others who tell him that the dwarf danced in the royal court before the revolution, but it escaped to the forest after it. The narrator begins fancying a girl who doesn’t respond back. The dwarf offers to seduce the girl by dancing inside his body with a condition that he would possess his body forever if he spoke. He ends up seducing the girl, and successfully defeats the dwarf when he tries to play tricks with his mind. However, people notice him and a warrant is issued for his arrest. He escapes and the dwarf asks him to let him inside his body. The story ends as the people get closer to him.
The Last Lawn of The Afternoon
The narrator mows lawn to earn money to spend time with his girlfriend who lived away. When she breaks off with him, he decides to quit his job to focus on his studies. On his last job, he meets a strange, tall woman who seems to be seducing him but just has him look at her daughter’s stuff. He realizes he never loved his girlfriend.
The Silence
The narrator is talking to a boxer, Ozawa, as both are waiting for their flights at the Airport. Ozawa tells him that once he hit a classmate, Aoki, while he was training at a boxing gym. Ozawa hated Aoki as he found him to be a narcissistic psychopathic bully. When Ozawa scores more than him, Aoki spreads rumors that Ozawa cheated. In a fit of anger, Ozawa punched him. Three years later, when a fellow student commits suicide, Aoki spreads rumor that Ozawa bullied him which led to him being questioned by police and ostracized by the school. He grows lonely and depressed, but soon realizes that Aoki is not worthy to be fought, he is to be pitied. As he realizes this, he finds it easy to get through life and other people like Aoki.
The Elephant Vanishes
The narrator reads in the newspaper about the elephant of his town disappearing. It is proven that the elephant’s keeper didn’t take him away or that it escaped on its own. The narrator expresses these feelings to a woman he is working with. He tells her saw the elephant for the last time from a distance, and it seemed to have shrunk. He is of the opinion that the elephant vanished by shrinking till it was not noticeable by the human eye. He seems to have been affected by this incident and is unable to get intimate with her.
