The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I existed.

This person, this self, this me, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

I don’t know – maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it’s all hit-or-miss macaroni cheese.