South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue It isn’t very hard to do

“There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can’t. And time passing is one thing that can’t be redone. Come this far, and you can’t go back. Don’t you think so?”

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.

simple change of scenery can bring about powerful shifts in the flow of time and emotions:

That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

Another person’s life is that person’s life. You can’t take responsibility. It’s like we’re living in a desert. You just have to get used to it.

“Our world’s exactly the same. Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That’s how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn’t make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.”

Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things just vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.

Promises—even vague ones like that—linger in your mind.

Reading trashy novels makes me feel I’m wasting time. It wasn’t always that way. I used to have lots of time, so even though I knew they were junk, I still felt something good would come from reading them. Now it’s different. Must be getting old.”

Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”

“But you know, Hajime, some feelings cause us pain because they remain. Don’t you think so?”

“the sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay forever.”

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star,” I said. “It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

Just because Shimamoto was gone, never to return, didn’t mean I could blithely bounce back to the life I’d had and pretend nothing had happened. Life isn’t that easy, and I don’t think it should be.

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an alternate reality—to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw.

always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself.