Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

“‘In travelling, a companion, in life, compassion’,”

“that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.”

“According to Aristophanes in Plato’s The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people,” Oshima says. “Have you heard about this?” “No.” “In ancient times people weren’t simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.”

smile whose sense of completeness is indescribable. It reminds me of a small, sunny spot, the special patch of sunlight you find only in some remote, secluded place.

I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.

It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann.

happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Time’s rules don’t apply here. Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

Just looking at that happy smile, you can trace the beautiful path that a contented heart must follow.

The kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building you find in any city, the kind which Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing.

“Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.”

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.”