The City and Its Uncertain Walls

by Haruki Murakami

When something is perfect, where are you supposed to head to then? This might be one of the issues with eternity—not knowing where you should go next. But how much value was there in a love that didn’t seek the eternal?

Maybe you were right. Once we actually met, those unlimited possibilities inevitably were replaced by a single reality. And this must have been hard for you. I could understand what you were trying to say, though I didn’t think that way myself. Possibilities are just that, possibilities and nothing else. For me, actually being beside you, feeling the warmth of your body, holding your hand, and sneaking in some kisses, away from prying eyes, was far better.

“When you have a plate on top of your head it’s best not to look up at the sky.”

In my eyes the world out there is the real world. People struggle there, grow old, grow weak, and die. Not so wonderful maybe, but isn’t that what the world’s really like? You’re supposed to accept that. And, as best I can, I join you in that. You can’t stop time, and when you die, you’re dead forever. Things that disappear are gone for good. You have to accept that that’s the way things are.”

Can you possibly imagine how painful it is to suddenly have the one you love leave for no reason, how much it hurt your heart, how deeply it ripped you apart, how much you bled inside?

And so I reached my eighteenth birthday, and then another year passed after I received that final letter. Time passed heavily, yet somehow briskly. A milestone would appear, only to fade away. And then another would come. I couldn’t comprehend how I was supposed to be as a person. Why was I here, doing what I was doing? And does such a strong wind always blow like this? I asked myself this so many times. An answer never came.

“Don’t listen to it,” my shadow whispered from my back. “And don’t look at it. It’s just an illusion. The town is showing us an illusion. So close your eyes and go through it. If you don’t believe what it says, and aren’t afraid, the wall doesn’t exist.”

Life, after all, was a long, drawn-out struggle. No matter how much sadness there was, how much loss and despair awaited us, you had to steadily move forward, step by painful step.

Tears, like blood, were wrung from the same warm body.

“This is what I’m trying to say. Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.

I shut my eyes and thought about time. In the past—for instance, back when I was seventeen—there was literally an inexhaustible amount of time. Like a huge reservoir, filled to the very brim. So there was no need to consider time. But now was different. Time, I knew, was limited. And as I aged, considering time had even greater implications. Time, no matter what, ticked away, ceaselessly.

This was M**’s cast-off skin. I was sure of it. Deep in this mountain forest, M** had sloughed off his body, which then changed into an old, faded wooden doll. And his soul, liberated from the confining prison of the physical body, had transitioned to the town surrounded by a high wall. That was a fact I had wanted to verify.

García Márquez, a Colombian novelist who had no need of the distinction between the living and the dead. What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.