Andrea Lee joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Barn Burning,” by Haruki Murakami, which appeared in a 1992 issue of the magazine. Lee’s books of fiction include “Sarah Phillips,” “Interesting Women,” and “Lost Hearts in Italy.” A new book, “Red Island House,” will be published by Scribner in 2021.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear barn burning by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, which was published in the New Yorker in November of 1992.
When you try to put it in words, it doesn't sound like anything special, but if you see it with your own eyes, for ten or 20 minutes, we were just chatting at the bar, and almost without thinking, she kept on performing it.
Gradually, the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you.
The story was chosen by Andrea Lee, who's the author of the National Book Award nominated memoir Russian Journal, and four books of fiction, including the forthcoming Red Island House, which will be published in 2021.
Hi, Andrea.
Hi, Debra.
So what made you choose a story by Murakami to read today?
Well, this has always been a story that I was very fond of.
I read it a long time ago, actually, in the magazine, and then I read it again when the collection came out.
The elephant vanishes.
But I was reminded of how much I liked it when I saw a film that is somewhat based on it, which is burning, that just came out this year by Lee Changdong, the korean director, which is a wonderful film.
So I went back and, of course, reread the Murakami story and remembered just how much I, how much it, you know, it just satisfies me in every way, has everything I like in a story.
So what are those things that you look for in a story?
Well, what I particularly like in stories, and in Murakami in particular, is the grounding that he does in the details of the everyday world and then somehow managing to enter subtly into other dimensions, into other realms.
This particular story, which starts out almost in a banal fashion, becomes terribly frightening.
It becomes a mystery.
It becomes frightening on so many levels.