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

by Haruki Murakami

It was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night in school, where I’d keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent my time holed up in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk with anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be pegged a stuck-up loner.

“When you’re always scheming about ways to make money, it’s like a part of you is lost.”

you don’t know how empty it feels not to be able to create anything.”

“I 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.

As far as the eye can see, the void is simply that–a void. I’ve been in that void before and forced myself to adjust. And now, finally, I end up where I began, and I’d better get used to it. No one will weave dreams for me–it is my turn to weave dreams for others. That’s what I have to do. Such dreams may have no power, but if my own life is to have any meaning at all, that is what I have to do.