It is post Kobe earthquake, and following his night of drunkenness –which the audience only hears about in the past tense- Yoshiya drags himself out of bed and forces himself to work. At the train station in Tokyo on the journey home, Yoshiya spots a man who is missing an earlobe. Yoshiya falls in after him without any hesitation, believing that there is a chance that this man is his father. After following him through a series of dark twisting streets and alleys, Yoshiya ends up on a baseball pitch; the man has disappeared. Yoshiya then dances in his frog like way, before having some kind of ambiguous epiphany in which Yoshiya ‘gives himself up to the flow of time’ and ends with Yoshiya saying “Oh God” aloud.
To start from the beginning, let’s tackle form.
The short story form makes Murakami’s writing seem quite fable-like. Unlike a long winded work of fiction, a short story delivers its message in the space of a few succinct pages, making the story seem like a cryptic parable.
Adapting this text to any other form would detract from the fable-like quality. A short story is, as its name states, short and sweet, and conveys its point quickly. A longer story would make the story seem like it was written for recreation, rather than to send a message to the audience. A play would make the story seem like something of a joke.