ONE STEP DOWN MR. PEANUT -Afternoon on the Islands of Langerhans-　Haruki Murakami

    I like naming things, especially new stores or magazines. It's fun to come up with names, but it's best when it's done among friends, jokingly suggesting names like "that's a good name" or "there's no way that would work, you're an idiot." However, when someone actually asks me to name their store, it becomes a bit of a burden. In the past, before I became a novelist, I ran a bar and named it after my old cat without putting too much thought into it. I just looked around and randomly picked something that caught my eye. If you give a name that's too complicated, it might come off as trying too hard, which could make customers uncomfortable. When I was planning to open a new store, I had thought of naming it "Kangaroo Weather," but I never ended up opening it, so I used the name for a collection of short stories instead. It's a lazy move, I know, but it was just a bar name turned book title.

In Washington, DC, there's a jazz club called "One Step Down," which had always intrigued me. When I saw one of my favorite singers, Mark Murphy, perform there, I asked the owner where the name came from, but I soon found out for myself. When you step through the door, the floor goes down one step, and I ended up falling because of it. It would have been better to put a warning sign on the door rather than naming the club after it. But despite the small and grubby atmosphere, it was a great jazz club where you could enjoy Mark Murphy's live performance and two beers for only $12.