Title: One Insult, One Dinner and the End of My Career
(Starring Murakami and Written by Stephen Queen)
Blog #5
September 28, 2025
Kafka has finally scuttled off my shoulder. No more midnight existential whispers about death, futility, and unpaid bills. My smoking habit has now upgraded to twenty sticks a day which I call personal growth.
Boss has gone off to sell indie books, which feels like the universe telling me it's time to move on too. The one good thing? I 've stopped haunting the Kepong pub. I am "sober."
Sober enough to have finished nine chapters of Rain and Sun. sober enough to cry on my laptop like a rejected poet in a Ghibli film.
And then Selome called.
Not the weapons-nanny version of her, but the real Selome - the one with the laugh that once broke me in two.
"Your kids miss you," she said.
"What kids?"
"Mine."
Thirteen years of silence, and suddenly I was back at her dinner table, drinking bamboo beer, a drink clearly designed for the Orangutan and the vegan., which is why both would rather eat bamboos."
Selome: You haven't changed. Still fat. Still sloppy. A pig."
Me: "At least I'm house-trained."
Selome: "Barely. You were always the type who left a mess in my house, in my life."
Me: "You're welcome. Consider it a pig even can climb the tree."
Selome: "If that's art., Picasso owes me a pig in a tree painting"
Somewhere, Orwell's pigs squealed in solidarity.
She paid the bill of course and then, as casually as asking me to pass the soy sauce, said:
Selome: Can you get my son a job?"
M e: "Sure, which financial crisis was I supposed to have fathered him in?"
Selome: " The one where you lost everything."
Selome: "So, which girl are you dating now? Another one of your "pet projects? "
Me: "Don't worry, none of them bite like you do."
Classic Selome, the kind of woman who could stab you with a dessert spoon and still have room for coffee and cake afterward.
I moved on. New company, better pay. They told me to set up a department from scratch, except ehty wouldn't give me a team. I wrote reports by day, cleaned toilets by nights, and waited for Kafka to appear in the janitor's closet with a clipboard:
" Welcome to The Trial: Part Two."
I buried Rain and Sun the way I buried Kafka.
*Selome invited me for Malaysian beers at Bamboo Hills. The beer tastes like Bamboo. I am not a Panda. Never again.
For a while, the stock market treated me well. I strutted around like Leonardo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street, minus the yacht, minus the money, minus Margot Robbie (my dream girl from whom I would give everything I own (1972), yes Bread-style just see her smile at the end of the movie.)
Eventually, I realized I was just the donkey pulling the cart toward a carrot that never got any closer.
So I quit.
Career: officially ended.
Now i live as Ben Stiller in The Secret Life of Murakami Pig, taking slow walks, buying convenience-store coffee at midnight, talking to invisible cockroaches, and writing blogs no one asked for.
And that's where I leave you. This is my last blog before I put the full stop on Rain and Sun.
But don't worry, the story doesn't end here. Next time you hear from me, I'll writing after the Netherlands trip.
Margot Robbie still won't be there. But maybe, just maybe, she'll show up in the book to break the fourth wall and say:
"You really should've ordered the salad."