Apr 30, 2026
my translation of the 53rd story (out 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!
I wonder, are there criminals still who kidnap kids by offering them ice cream?
When I was that precious, young, kidnappable age, I heard the warnings all the time. And it made some sense. Who wouldn’t succumb to ice cream then?
Soft serve ice cream—the only kind a kid could care about—was discovered by artisan mistake. The cone was added after to give the cream a place to rest when your tongue needed a break from the cold. These were things I’d known. I knew that the white ice cream was vanilla, the brown was chocolate, the red was strawberry. I knew you could buy a swirl of any two. I knew if you ate it scrupulously from the top till you hit the cone, you’d condemned yourself to sticky hands. I knew you had to lick around the sides, to make a column.
All I didn’t know then was the taste.
When something tastes bad, it goes, you can’t forget it. When something’s good, the memory won’t stay.
Once I reached the bottom of any cone, its little recesses so much like netting… once I’d ate those last few crunchy bits… The taste of soft serve had already left me.
If only I could have had a cone three whole days in a row—no, even just two cones two days alone—then the taste would stay forever mine.
But no: such a dream was no more than delicious fantasy. The true sweet memory of soft serve ice cream would remain an abstract thing, no more than a tempting topic of discussion between friends.
Translator's Note: again, with Itoi, this: the way he strings his sentences together feels so natural in Japanese, but I can't adapt it to English quite the same, not without altering the casual voice. Instead, as usual, I fall to punctuation. See those ellipses there? I made them up. They're an original. Again, I err on the side of "a casual deal."