Taken from Haruki Murakami book, Norwegian Wood.

Sunday morning I got up at nine, shaved, did my laundry, and hung the clothes on the roof. It was a beautiful day. The first smell of autumn was in the air. Red dragonflies were flitting around the quadrangle, chased by neighborhood kids swinging nets. With no wind, the Rising Sun hung limp on its pole. I put a freshly ironed shirt and walked from the dorm to the streetcar stop. A student neighborhood on a Sunday morning: the streets were dead, virtually empty, most stores closed. What few sounds there were echoed with special clarity. A girl wearing sabots clip-clopped across the asphalt roadway, and next to the streetcar barn four or five kids were throwing rocks at a line of empty cans. A flower store was open, so I went in and bought some daffodils. Daffodils in the autumn: that was strange. But I had always liked that particular flower.

Three old women were the only passengers on the Sunday morning streetcar. They all looked at me and my flowers. One of them gave me a smile. I smiled back. I sat in the last seat and watched the old houses passing close by the window. The streetcar almost touched the overhanging eaves. The laundry deck of one house had ten potted tomato plants, next to which a big black cat lay stretched out in the sun. In the yard of another house, a little kid was blowing soap bubbles. I heard an Ayumi Ishida song coming from someplace and could even catch the smell of curry cooking. The street-car snaked its way through this private back-alley world. A few more passengers got on at stops along the way but the three old women went on talking intently about something huddled together face-to- face. 

I got off near Otsuka Station and followed Midori's map down a broad street without much to look at. None of the shops along the way seemed to be doing very well, housed as they were in old buildings with gloomy-looking interiors and faded writing on some of the signs. Judging from the age and style of the buildings, this area had been spared the wartime air raids, leaving whole blocks intact. A few of the places had been entirely rebuilt, but just about all had been enlarged or repaired in spots, and it was those additions that tended to look far more shabby than the old buildings themselves.

The whole atmosphere of the place suggested that most of the people who used to live here had become fed up with the cars and the filthy air and the noise and high rents and moved to the suburbs, leaving only cheap apartments and company flats and hard-to-move shops and a few stubborn holdouts who clung to old family properties. Everything looked blurred and grimy as if wrapped in a haze of exhaust gas.

Ten minutes' walk down this street brought me to a corner gas station where I turned right into a short block of shops in the middle of which hung the sign for Kobayashi Bookstore. True, it was not a big store, but neither was it as small as Midori's description had led me to imagine. It was just a typical neighborhood bookstore, the same kind I used to run to on the very day the boys' magazine came out. A nostalgic mood overtook me as I stood in front of the place.

The whole front of the store was sealed off by a big, roll down metal shutter inscribed with a magazine advertisement : "Weekly Bunshun Sold Here Thursdays." I still had fifteen minutes to noon, but I didn't want to kill time wandering through the block with a handful of daffodils, so I pressed the doorbell beside the shutter and stepped a few paces back to wait. Fifteen seconds went by without an answer, and I was debating myself whether to ring again when I heard a window clatter open above me. I looked up to find Midori leaning out and waving.