In an interview with Deborah Treisman, Murakami mentioned passingly that Cream could become a part of a series of short stories or a full-length novel at some point.

I sat there trying to calm my breathing, the old man silently watching. His gaze didn’t waver for an instant. It made me feel uncomfortable—as if I’d wandered into someone’s back yard without permission—and I wanted to get up from the bench and head off to the bus stop as fast as I could. But, for some reason, I couldn’t get to my feet. Time passed, and then suddenly the old man spoke.

“A circle with many centers.”

In Cream our eighteen-year-old narrator is invited to a piano recital by an old acquaintance, a girl he barely knew. The recital never takes place.

“There are several centers—no, sometimes an infinite number—and it’s a circle with no circumference.” The old man frowned as he said this, the wrinkles on his forehead deepening. “Are you able to picture that kind of circle in your mind?”

The story begins with the narrator reminiscing the strange events of that night, to a much younger friend. Questions are asked, conclusions never reached. All is left is a lonely night out in Kobe, where two strangers converse, sitting on a park bench.

Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless.