Abandoning A Cat

'Even now, I can relive the shared puzzlement of that summer day when we rode together on his bike to the beach at Koroen to abandon a striped cat, a cat that totally got the better of us...'

In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are, Haruki Murakami recalls his relationship with his father - the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him to fight in the Second World War. Murakami's father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher, but as Haruki grew older they found they had less and less in common. They went on to be estranged for twenty years, only reconciling on his father's deathbed.