Mohsin Hamid Reads Haruki Murakami

And now here's Mohsin Hamid reading Man-Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

Man-Eating Cats.

I bought a newspaper at the harbor and came across an article about an old woman who had been eaten by cats.

She was 70 years old and lived alone in a small suburb of Athens, a quiet sort of life, just her and her three cats in a small one-room apartment.

One day, she suddenly keeled over face down on the sofa, a heart attack most likely.

Nobody knew how long it had taken for her to die after she collapsed.

The old woman didn't have any relatives or friends who visited her regularly, and it was a week before her body was discovered.

The windows and the door were closed, and the cats were trapped.

There wasn't any food in the apartment.

Granted, there was probably something in the fridge, but cats haven't evolved to the point where they can open refrigerators.

On the verge of starvation, they were forced to devour their owner's flesh.

I read this article to Izumi, who was sitting across from me.

On sunny days, we'd walk to the harbor, buy a copy of the Athens English language newspaper, and order coffee at the cafe next door to the tax office, and I'd summarize in Japanese anything interesting I might come across.

That was the extent of our daily schedule on the island.

If something in a particular article caught our interest, we'd bat around opinions for a while.

Izumi's English was pretty fluent, and she could easily have read the articles herself, but I never once saw her pick up a paper.

"I like to have someone read to me," she explained.

"It's been my dream ever since I was a child to sit in a sunny place, gaze at the sky or the sea, and have someone read aloud to me.

I don't care what they read, a newspaper, a textbook, a novel.

It doesn't matter.

But no one's ever read to me before, so I suppose that means you're making up for all those lost opportunities.

Besides, I love your voice." We had the sky and the sea there all right, and I enjoyed reading aloud.

When I lived in Japan, I used to read picture books aloud to my son.

Reading aloud is different from just following sentences with your eyes.

Something quite unexpected wells up in your mind, a kind of indefinable resonance that I find impossible to resist.