unclear relationship. The woman, an amateur mime, decides to leave Japan for Algiers. Three months later, she returns with a Japanese boyfriend. One day, the woman and her boyfriend ask if they can visit the man's home; because his wife is away visiting relatives, he agrees to the gathering. The three drink carelessly and smoke marijuana in the man's living room; the woman needs to be helped to bed after smoking one joint. Back in the living room, the boyfriend tells him about his idiosyncratic need to burn a barn about every two months. Interested, the man asks why and how he does this. The boyfriend replies that he feels morally obligated to do so and that he picks the barns that he will burn based on their condition. After the woman wakes up, she and the boyfriend leave the man's place, leaving the man very curious about barn burning. He plans his next few days around scouting possible barns nearby that the boyfriend might burn. He narrows it down to five barns, and passes by all of them on his morning run for a month, but there are no signs of arson. The man sees the boyfriend again during Christmas and they share coffee. He asks if the boyfriend has burned a barn recently; he says he did a month ago. Before leaving, the boyfriend asks if the man has seen the woman lately; he says no, and the boyfriend says that he has not either, and she does not answer her phone or door. The man checks her apartment and sees that her mailbox is filled with fliers. When he checks again later, he sees a new name on the door and realizes that she has disappeared. Continuing his daily routine, he sometimes thinks about barns burning. "The Little Green Monster" A monster burrows up into a woman's garden, breaks into her house, and proposes love. The creature can read her mind and she uses this fact to fight against it. Because of her adamant rejection of the monster, it eventually dies, reduced to nothing more than a shadow. "Family Affair" A bachelor and his younger sister live together in a Tokyo apartment. During a trip to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, the sister meets a man named Noboru Watanabe who later becomes her fiancé; the man disapproves of her choice. The sister retorts by saying that she