Three more. The prompts are in italics. They read like dreams.

“On my first day in London, I went for a walk with my friend Katherine. We began at Trafalgar Square, where there is a big bust of Winston Churchill and a smaller bust of King George III. We then crossed the park, along a path which leads toward a tunnel that used to take me under Waterloo Bridge and the Thames. In the tunnel, we caught up with three other friends, one of whom was carrying her violin. We walked across the Thames to Westminster Bridge, and from there into the city.

I had been in London for several days, and the first time I saw it, I thought it was my former home. The people I knew from Washington University were still there, and several of them showed me around the city. One of my friends from that period, Helen, took me to meet her husband in a part of London called Notting Hill, where we wandered through lovely little houses built on narrow, leafy streets. I did some sightseeing, and was at the Tate Modern in an exhibition called “Images in Time.” I remember the huge portraits of two African-American women and a couple of sculptures by Charles Ray, which I liked very much. But my favorite work in the show was Andy Warhol’s tribute to the singer Madonna. It was”

“On my first day in San Francisco, I went on a hike on the Golden Gate trail. When I got to the first part of the trail, I had to cross the railroad tracks. At one point, it was a busy and bustling town, but now it’s not even alive with traffic at all. The area was a dump; it was no longer a dumpy dump. It was an amazing transformation. I had never seen such a thing in my life. As I hiked further into the Golden Gate National Park, I stopped to get a bite to eat and get a bottle of water. I came across a beautiful, serene old-looking gentleman standing in front of the store.

He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, with sandals, and what looked like a loose, fitted, khaki pants. His head was shaved bald, except for a sideburn and a small patch of hair right above his top ear. He had bright, orange-tinted, 70’s-style glasses on, and a huge smile on his face. He said, “Are you visiting? Are you from San Francisco? You’re about to get to the Golden Gate National Park? This is a wonderful place. You should see the ocean. There is nothing”

“On my first day in Tokyo, I go to see a little newspaper office. There’s a wall full of sheets of newsprint and the woman manning the desk, in her late twenties or early thirties, with a Hello Kitty pen set in her desk drawer and her hair in neat ponytail, is diligently putting together a comic strip called I Love You By Hokusai, which is a pastiche of the famous Japanese woodblock prints. The strip features a girl, Yuki, who loves Hello Kitty, Natsuki, a girl who’s into anime and Japanese hip-hop, Minnie Mouse, and Hot Chocolate. The comics aren’t going anywhere—they are, in fact, part of the paper’s entire newspaper business. They’re just going to be running more of them now.

My day, though, is spent going to cafes with Haruki Murakami and other writers. In the days after we’d met, I saw a couple of articles about Murakami. One described him as not just a famous author, but a guru of the literati: how he was well-dressed, didn’t show off his money and just preferred to spend it on books rather than on his five luxurious apartments”