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

I'm Jeb Retricemon, 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 UFO in Cushiro by Hurricane Maracami,

translated from the Japanese by J. Rubin,

which was published in The New Yorker in March of 2001.

Each article contains some new tragedy, but to Komodo, those tragedies registered as oddly lacking in depth.

The aftermath of the earthquake was like a distant monotonous echo to him.

The only thing he could give any serious thought to was his wife's drawing ever further away.

The story was chosen by Brian Washington, whose debut story collection Lot was published last year,

and whose first novel Memorial will come out in October.

Hi, Brian.

Hey, Deborah, how are you?

I'm all right.

Doing okay.

So we're here to talk about Maracami,

and I get the sense that he's been important to you as a writer.

Why is that?

I think that it's a question of timing on my end.

I didn't really grow up as voracious of a reader as a lot of my peers,

and I think that the authors and creators that I had first contact with end up

have an outsized influence on how I deform and structure,

...