May 27, 2026
my translation of the 32th story (of 99) of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!
—July 26th, you shall not step outside, the fortune teller told me.
—How about an arm? I asked, my terror mounting.
—An arm?
—Yeah, say I want to get the morning paper? Can I reach for something?
—I guess an arm won’t matter. As long as you keep your legs in.
—If I do step out though… Well, what happens?
—The unimaginable.
—Unimaginable?
—Yes.
—As in… Will a giant ant-eater come eat me?
—No, of course not.
—Why not?
—Because. You’ve already imagined it.
Of course…
I didn’t especially believe what the fortune teller told me, but come July 26th I locked my door and kept inside, drank a few beers, listened to a few Doors records. Unimaginable nightmares ran through my imagination like wild. The more I imagined, the less was unimaginable.
In the end though, after all, such thought was pointless. No matter how many terrors I imagined, as soon as I thought one up is was by definition imaginable.
Fair enough.
July 26th had to be a beautiful day. Sun spread across the surface of the earth, or blessed it, warming people out of doors down to their metaphysical depths. Children’s voices carried from the pool around the corner.
The pool: a full twenty-five meters… wonderfully cold…
No—there could be an anaconda in it.
Anaconda, I wrote in my notebook.
Thus the anaconda was no longer possible. I’d imagined it.
Time went on, shadows grew long, then evening happened. Seventeen empty beer cans on the table, twenty-one records listened to then put away. I’d become immensely bored.
Seven o’clock, the phone rang.
—Wanna come get drinks? so and so asked me.
—I can’t, I said.
—C’mon, we’ll make it an occasion.
What kind of occasion? I thought.
Acute alcohol poisoning, I wrote.
Eleven-fifty, the phone rang again. This time a woman.
—I’ve been thinking about us, she said. Our break up…
—Uh huh, I said.
—What you said the other night, you know, I’ve just been going over it over and over again, she said.
—Uh huh.
—Please… let’s meet tonight.
STDs, pregnancy, I wrote.
Eleven-fifty-five, another call—the fortune teller.
—I see you haven’t left the house, she said.
—Of course, I said. But tell me, what was this unimaginable danger I had to hide from. What was this for?
—What about a condor?
—A condor? I said.
—Did you ever think about a condor?
—No, I answered.
—Well then, it was a condor. It swooped down and grabbed you by the spine then dropped you off, oh, in the ocean, far away.
A condor, huh?
The clock struck midnight.
translator's note: i've missed the murakami ones, his voice fits well with mine. if i were trying to imitate itoi in english (as he does here in japanese), id sound like this