“I drink my lukewarm tea, then drop the teacup on the floor. Every so often I drop my teacup like this, on purpose. Their bodies seething with hatred, but without letting that hatred out, sending deep black waves rippling through the air in every direction, the humans begin sweeping up the fragments of my teacup.
“I gaze at the figures on my computer screen, acting as if nothing had happened. The dim red light of the setting sun streams in through the glass of the office’s wide windows. The sunset has expanded until it fills the sky. A raging sunset that occupies the entire sky over Tokyo.
“I begin noting down in my pad the order in which I’ll go collect them.”
—Hiromi Kawakami, from “Mogera Wogura,” translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich
Art Credit Ian Francis
