This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, 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 10 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 we 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 Chang-dong, the Korean director,

which is a wonderful film.

...