1Q84: Book 3

by Haruki Murakami

I think I’ll stay alive here a bit longer, and see with my own eyes what’s going to happen. I can still die after that – it won’t be too late. Probably.

As he watched his father, Tengo started to have doubts about the difference between a person being alive and being dead. Maybe there really wasn’t much of a difference to begin with, he thought. Maybe we just decided, for convenience’s sake, to insist on a difference.

Beyond the garden and lawn was the dark line of the pine windbreak, through which came the sound of waves. The rough waves of the Pacific. It was a thick, darkish sound, as if many souls were gathered, each whispering his story. They seemed to be seeking more souls to join them, seeking even more stories to be told.

“But actually time isn’t a straight line. It doesn’t have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn’t have any form. But since we can’t picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.”

I was always stuck between feelings of inferiority and superiority. I often used to think I was like Raskolnikov, except I never met Sonia.

Like the king whose touch turned everything to gold, every single word he uttered turned into insipid grains of sand.

Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.

Ushikawa began to think of himself as a nocturnal creature, concealed in a dark forest, waiting for prey to wander by. He waited patiently for an opportunity, and when it came he would leap out and grab it.

Plus, he knew this: that no matter how far away his daughters went from him, his blood still flowed inside them. His daughters might forget all about him, but that blood would not lose its way. Blood had a frighteningly long memory.

He had nothing left to lose, other than his life. It was all very clear-cut. In the darkness, a razor-thin smile came to Ushikawa’s lips.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

Soon everything struck him as empty. He had never felt so utterly alone, never felt the dark to be this intense.

As she watched the clouds, appearing from somewhere only to disappear again, Aomame felt she had been transported to a spot near the edge of the world. This was the northern frontier of reason. There was nothing north of here – only the chaos of nothingness.

Your own lives are surely very important to each one of you. Very precious to you. I get it. But to me they don’t matter one way or the other. To me, you’re just flimsy paper dolls walking across a stage.

lived there might be Tengo. And then again he might not. Once you get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you get disappointed, and disappointment leads to a feeling of helplessness. You get careless and let your guard down.

People naturally pay their respects to the dead. The person had, after all, just accomplished the personal, profound feat of dying.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

The two of us are a team. Like Tengo and Eriko Fukada made up a brilliant team when they created Air Chrysalis, Tengo and I are a team for this new story. Our wills – or maybe some undercurrent of our wills – are becoming one, creating this complex story and propelling it forward. This process probably takes place on some deep, invisible level. Even if we aren’t physically together, we are connected, as one. We create the story, and at the same time the story is what sets us in motion.

To rephrase Tolstoy’s famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.

“How far away are we talking about?” “It’s a distance that can’t be measured.” “Like the distance that separates one person’s heart from another’s.”

Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music.

The thought filled him with joy. Just as I’ve been thinking of her, she’s been thinking of me. Tengo could hardly believe it – that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people’s hearts – a boy’s and a girl’s – could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn’t seen each other for twenty years.

Wasn’t it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts.

What Tengo needed then more than anything was wisdom – the wisdom of the night that had put down roots into the soil. A wisdom that might only be found in the depths of sleep.

How much time had passed? Five minutes, perhaps, or was it an hour? Or a whole day? Or maybe time had stood still. What did Tengo understand about time? He knew he could stay like this forever, the two of them silent on top of the slide, holding hands. He had felt that way at age ten, and now, twenty years on, he felt the same.

The eyes of the moons were covered. And the boy and the girl, hand in hand, made their way out of the forest.