Photograph by Kevin Trageser / Redux

Your story in this week’s issue, “With the Beatles,” involves a man thinking about two girls from his high-school years, one whom he glimpsed only once, and another who was his first serious girlfriend. The former he remembers for a passionate gesture―the way she clutched a Beatles LP to her chest “as if it were something precious.” He remembers the other girl as “charming,” but, although they dated for years, she was never quite the one for him. Why do you think the first girl, seen once, was so memorable, and the girl he knew for years wasn’t?

For the narrator, the first girl, the one he passes in the hallway at school, is a kind of symbol. In this case, a symbol of yearning. Symbols don’t age, aren’t full of contradictions, and probably don’t disappoint anyone. She is a lot like the symbol that appears at the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City,” whom he names “the girl.”

To tell the truth, I have almost exactly the same memory myself. When I was in high school, I passed a girl in the hallway, a girl whose name I didn’t know, who was clutching a copy of “With the Beatles” to her as if it were something precious. That scene was etched in my mind and became a symbol, for me, of adolescence. Sometimes scraps of memory like that can be the trigger that brings a story into being.

But the reality we actually deal with is different from a symbol. And sometimes nothing can fill in the gap between the two—between symbol and reality. This story is fiction, of course, but my guess is that most people have experienced something similar.

At the center of the story are a few hours that the narrator spends with his girlfriend’s older brother. The brother tells him that he suffers from bouts of total memory loss. How does that idea of lost time―of part of the brother’s life disappearing, as though he’d jumped from the middle of the second movement of a Mozart symphony to the middle of the third―connect to the rest of the story?

The narrator doesn’t know how much of what his girlfriend’s older brother tells him is true, or how seriously to take it. But he is strangely drawn to the brother, and the same is true of the author. In fiction, you need a third party whom you are strangely drawn to. The brother is a supporting character, but still I get the sense that he may be the mastermind who sets the plot in motion. (Of course, this is completely my own personal impression.)

While he is with the brother, the narrator reads aloud a section from the story “Spinning Gears,” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, a story that was written shortly before Akutagawa committed suicide. In the end (spoiler alert!), it is the girlfriend, not her brother, who commits suicide. Did you have that end in mind for her when you started writing the story?

The story never makes clear why Sayoko committed suicide. I don’t think anyone can know what really lay behind it. Even I, the author, don’t know. Normally, the darkness that people hold within themselves is unseen. It erupts when you don’t expect it, in a form and a place you can’t anticipate, and, in most cases, by the time it becomes apparent it’s too late to do anything about it.

Sayoko’s brother was (probably) able to weather that kind of crisis in his life, but she wasn’t. Or perhaps the more he rose up, the more she sank down. Years later, the narrator learns only the results of all this. Could someone have saved Sayoko? No one can say. All we can do is save someone in the here and now.

The narrator admits that he was never very enthusiastic about the Beatles. Their music was just the wallpaper surrounding his youth, and he didn’t go out of his way to listen to it. Did you share that feeling with your character?

I was pretty snobby when I was a teen-ager, and I was crazy about jazz and classical music. It’s true that the Beatles were basically musical wallpaper. I heard their songs a lot on the radio but always kind of half listened. And I didn’t buy their records. It wasn’t until the nineteen-eighties, when I was living on an island in Greece, that I went down to the beach and listened to the White Album from start to finish on my Walkman. I listened to it over and over and was blown away by their music for the first time.

In your last story in the magazine, “Cream,” a girl invites a boy to a piano recital. When he arrives, there is no recital and no sign of the girl. In “With the Beatles,” the narrator’s girlfriend invites him to her house, and, when he arrives, she has disappeared. What is it about this scenario that appeals to you as a fiction writer?

I tend to be drawn to what’s missing. You come across something missing, suddenly, when you don’t expect it—like, you’re walking across a field and fall into a dried-up well. I don’t know why, but I’m attracted to that sort of situation. Something that should be there isn’t, someone who should be there isn’t. And that’s when the story begins.

Haruki Murakami’s answers were translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel.