Photograph by Nathan Bajar / NYT / Redux

In “Cream,” your story in this week’s issue, the narrator recounts to a younger friend a strange incident that happened to him years before. Why did you choose to frame the story that way?

I’m not sure. I probably thought that it was better to have the story told retrospectively, rather than in the voice of a teen-ager.

When he was eighteen years old, the narrator received an invitation to a piano recital from a girl he barely knew, and, as it turned out, the recital didn’t happen, and the narrator never found out why. Do you have a theory about what happened? Is there a possible innocent explanation for this?

A lot of unexplained things have happened to me over the years, and those experiences often seem to speak to me, metaphorically, about my life. Not in a literal way, but figuratively.

The narrator is at a transitional time, between high school and university. Instead of cramming for the university entrance exam, he spends his days reading novels at the library. Does his in-between state somehow trigger the rest of the story? Does he need this kind of mystery to prod him to get his life back on track?

He’s in limbo, moving between adolescence and manhood, and as he does so he has a number of odd experiences that confuse him. Books are a life preserver he clings to. I went through the same period myself, and books meant a lot to me then, too. So did music, as well as cats.

An old man appears to the boy and poses an impossible riddle. Is the old man real? A figment of the boy’s imagination? A manifestation of his future self? What does he want from―or for―this boy?

The young man needs someone to guide him, someone like this old man. But finding the right guide is very difficult.

Do you have an answer to the puzzle the old man poses? Is there such a thing as a circle with many centers but no circumference?

I think it corresponds to a kind of faith. This doesn’t have to be a particular religion, though.

Although the narrator never solved the mystery of what happened that day, he did learn something that stayed with him ever since. Did having no answer become an answer in itself?

Sometimes asking the right question is better than getting the right answer. I’ve always kept that in mind in my life, and as I’ve written my stories.

The story is set in Kobe, where you grew up. What made you choose that as the location for “Cream”?

It was because the scenery that this eighteen-year-old man sees and the scenery in Kobe blend together within me.

Is the story part of a series or a new collection you’re working on?

I hadn’t thought about it, but, now that you mention it, I could see possibly making it into a series (or a full-length novel). Thank you for the suggestion!

(Answers translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel.)