The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

IS IT POSSIBLE, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

“Tell me,” she said at last, “do you like cats?” “Crazy about them,” I said. “Always had one when I was a kid. I played with it constantly, even slept with it.” “Lucky you. I was dying to have a cat. But they wouldn’t let me. My mother hated them. Not once in my life have I managed to get something I really wanted. Not once. Can you believe it? You can’t understand what it’s like to live like that. When you get used to that kind of life – of never having anything you want – then you stop knowing what it is you want.”

I rarely suffer lengthy emotional distress from contact with other people. A person may anger or annoy me, but not for long. I can distinguish between myself and another as beings of two different realms. It’s a kind of talent (by which I do not mean to boast: it’s not an easy thing to do, so if you can do it, it is a kind of talent – a special power). When someone gets on my nerves, the first thing I do is to transfer the object of my unpleasant feelings to another domain, one having no connection with me. Then I tell myself, Fine, I’m feeling bad, but I’ve put the source of these feelings into another zone, away from here, where I can examine it and deal with it later in my own good time. In other words, I put a freeze on my emotions. Later, when I thaw them out to perform the examination, I do from time to time find my emotions still in a distressed state, but that is rare. The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then, sooner or later, I forget about them.

“You must be very worried,” she said. “There is nothing I can say at this point, but things should become clear before too long. Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of the tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.”

“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”

“Feelings need to be let out sometimes. Otherwise, the flow can stagnate inside. I’m sure you feel better now that you have said what you wanted to say.”

I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. Like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.

“I’m telling you, you’ve got a problem,” she said, with a sigh. “It’s true, I do have a problem.” “Stop agreeing with everything I say! It’s not as if you’re going to solve everything by admitting your mistakes. Whether you admit them or not, mistakes are mistakes.” “It’s true,” I said. It was true.

No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by. But my one-day absence was probably not affecting anybody. Not one human being would have noticed that I was gone. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest hiccup. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.

“Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. In most cases, not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to eradicate.”

“Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”

“I don’t want to stick my nose in where I’m not wanted, but just let me say this: you really ought to sit down and think hard about what it is that’s most important to you.” I nodded. “I have been thinking about that,” I said. “But things are so complicated and tangled up. I can’t seem to separate them out and do one thing at a time. I don’t know how to untangle things.” My uncle smiled. “You know what I think? I think what you ought to do is start by thinking about the simplest things and go from there. For example, you could stand on a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by. You’re not in any hurry to decide anything. It may be tough, but sometimes you’ve got to just stop and take time. You ought to train yourself to look at things with your own eyes until something becomes clear. And don’t be afraid of putting some time into it. Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.” “Revenge?! What do you mean, ‘revenge’? Revenge against whom?” “You’ll understand soon enough,” said my uncle, with a smile.

Apart from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals. But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o’clock in the morning.

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

I’m sorry, though. I know I should never have done that to you (or to anybody). But I can’t help myself sometimes. I know exactly what I’m doing, but I just can’t stop. That’s my greatest weakness.

Anyhow, even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I’d be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don’t know, I guess I just want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely. In that sense, I guess, I’m probably still “on the road to recovery”.

may kasahara </////3

He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette and trying to sort out his feelings. He stared at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked as it always had. He could find in it no signs of change. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until then.

“You can’t keep it up for ever, though. You’re going to burn out sooner or later. Everybody does. It’s the way people are made. In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don’t worry, you’ll burn out. Especially in the world that you’re trying to deal with: everybody burns out. There are too many tricky things going on in it, too many ways of getting into trouble. It’s a world made of tricky things.

Why was I born into this world as the child of such absolute dummies? And why didn’t I turn into the same kind of stupid tree frog daughter even though I was raised by those people? I’ve been wondering and wondering about that ever since I can remember. But I can’t explain it. It seems to me there ought to be a good reason, but it’s a reason that I can’t find. And there are tons of other things that don’t have logical explanations. For example, “Why does everybody hate me?” I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just living my life in the usual way. But then, all of a sudden, one day I noticed that nobody liked me. I don’t understand it.

may kasahara you are so me

In this whole long time since you left, I’ve lived with a feeling of having been thrown into absolute darkness.

I empty my mind for a while, breathing steadily by the refrigerator. A terrible quiet seems to have descended on everything. I feel as if the world is listening for my next thought. But I can’t think of anything. Sorry, but I just can’t think of anything.

Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle – a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth.

this is a summary of the whole book in one sentence btw.

When I’ve got my collar up and my scarf wrapped round and round under my chin, and my breath makes white puffs in the air, and I’ve got a chunk of bread in my pocket, and I’m walking down the path in the woods, thinking about the duck people, I get this really warm, happy feeling, and it hits me that I haven’t felt happy like this for a long, long time.

may kasahara my beloved