My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake: Summary and Meaning

Some of the best Murakami writing is not in the novels at all. "My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake" is a short autobiographical piece about the early days of his marriage, when he and his wife rented a strange little house on a sliver of land between two railway lines. This My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake summary walks through the story in our own words and explains why it still sticks with readers.

A note on the title: it circulates in a few translations, including "Cheesecake-Shaped Poverty." We think the image is the point either way. Poverty, here, has a literal shape: a long, sharp wedge of cake.

My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake: the story in brief

Murakami sets the scene around 1972 or 1973. He and his wife, newly married and, as he puts it with a grin, poor enough to qualify for a record book, found a rental house on a triangular plot. He asks us to picture a round cheesecake sliced into twelve pieces: one narrow slice, with a thirty-degree point, is the exact shape of the land. Nobody in the neighbourhood could tell him why it was shaped that way.

On one side of the wedge ran a national rail line, on the other a private line, and the two tracks fanned apart at the sharp end where the house stood. The comedy of the piece lies in the noise. Open the front door and a train is in front of you; open the back window and there is another. Passengers were close enough to meet eyes with. And there was no quiet after the last train, because late freight trains took over until the first passenger service of the morning.

So why live there? The rent was unbeatable. It was a detached house with three rooms, a bath and a small garden, for about the price of a tiny apartment, and being detached meant they could keep a cat. When the estate agent warned them it was noisy, the couple spent an hour in the empty house, waiting out trains, pausing mid-sentence every time one passed. Murakami jokes that this broken, interrupted conversation was very much in the style of a French New Wave film. Then his wife said, in effect, that if he was happy, they should take it, and the agent, peering at the young pair, signed them up.

Moving took thirty minutes. Their belongings were bedding, clothes, a few books and the cat: no television, radio, fridge, phone or heater. They stayed for two years. The gaps in the old house let in drafts, which made summer pleasant and winter miserable. With no stove, the couple and the cat huddled in the bedding at night, and the kitchen sink was sometimes frozen in the morning.

Then comes the gentlest moment. In April, the railway workers went on strike, and for a day no train ran. The couple carried the cat out onto the sunny tracks and enjoyed a stillness that Murakami compares to sitting on the bottom of a lake. They were young, newly married, and the sunshine was free. He ends by saying that the word "poor" still brings that long, thin plot of land to mind, and wondering who lives in the house now.

Context: before the novels, before the jazz bar

This is the period just before Murakami became a writer. In the early 1970s he was a young man in Tokyo who had married while still a student, and soon afterwards opened a small jazz bar, a chapter we cover in our post on how he went from jazz bar owner to author in a day. A fan page we found places the house in the Kokubunji and Kunitachi area, and says it was still standing when we first wrote about this essay, though we have not been able to confirm that today.

Themes: poverty, humour and love

Poverty without self-pity. The essay is funny precisely because it refuses to be tragic. The author is amused by his own situation. He notes with dry pride how simple life becomes when you own nothing, and the loudest hardship (the trains) becomes the source of the best jokes.

Intimacy under pressure. Whenever a train passes, the couple must stop talking and wait. It is a clever image of marriage: two people who learn each other's silences. The cat in the bed, the warmth in the cold, the shared sunshine on the empty tracks all make togetherness feel like the real "property" of the household.

Nostalgia for what was hard. The piece never claims that cold winters are secretly romantic. Murakami is clear that poverty meant discomfort. But memory has made the triangle shape and the strike-day quiet into something almost tender. That mix of honesty and affection is typical of his essays.

Why it still resonates

We first shared this at a time when many people had lost jobs and were worried about money. The story speaks to anyone who has had a small, awkward first home, or who has made a life with little and found, much later, that those were rich years. It also shows the Murakami habit of building a whole mood from one odd, perfect image: a slice of cheesecake.

FAQ

What is "My Poverty Shaped Like a Cheesecake" about?

It is Murakami's short autobiographical piece about renting a cheap house on a triangular plot between two railways with his wife and their cat, in the early 1970s. The story mixes hardship with comedy and affection.

Why is the land called a cheesecake?

Murakami describes the plot as a long thin wedge, like a twelfth of a round cheesecake with a thirty-degree point. It is his way of making an odd piece of land easy to picture.

Is the cheesecake house real?

The essay is autobiographical, and a fan page suggests the house was in the Kokubunji area of western Tokyo. We cannot independently confirm whether it still stands.

A closing thought

We read it as a love story disguised as a complaint about trains. Harukists, did you ever live somewhere ridiculous and loved it anyway? Tell us about your own "cheesecake house" in the comments.