Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

Deep rivers run quiet.

Although, in any strict sense, it’s not killing time at all. For only through assiduous repetition is it possible to redistribute skewed tendencies.

more often than not I’ve observed that convenient approximations bring you closest to comprehending the true nature of things.

A nostalgic yet impossible pastiche of sentiments, as if two wholly unrelated memories had threaded together in an unknown recess. Feelings like this sometimes come over me. And most often due to specific scents.

These beasts of every imaginable shade drifted quietly over the newly greening countryside as if wafted about on a breeze. Almost meditative in their stillness, their breathing hushed as morning mist, they nibbled at the young grass with not a sound.

Spring passed, summer ended, and just now as the light takes on a diaphanous glow and the first gusts of autumn ripple the waters of the streams, changes become visible in the beasts.

Navigating the darkling streets like a pale transparent fish, down cobbled arcades, past the enclosures of houses and stone walls lining the walkways along the river, the call goes out. Everything is immersed in the call. It cuts through invisible airborne sediments of time, quietly penetrating the furthest reaches of the Town.

These autumn beasts crouch in a hush, each to each, their long golden fur radiant in the sunset. Unmoving, like statues set in place, they wait with lifted heads until the last rays of the day sink into the apple trees. When finally the sun is gone and the gloom of night draws over them, the beasts lower their heads, laying their one white horn to earth, and close their eyes.

I was a leftover wrapped in black plastic and shoved into the cooler.

but this was becoming absurd.

You mean this wasn't already absurd? I am so curious to find out what this man's job is and what is happening here. I have absolutely zero guesses.

Had I been led around in a circle back to the same room? Maybe in fact I had; maybe in fact I hadn’t. Hard to memorize the precise position of each scattered paperclip.

If I ever get reincarnated, it occurred to me, let me make certain I don’t come back as a paperclip.

You dig a hole and the next thing they say is fill it in; fill it in and they tell you to dig a hole. They’re always screwing with the guy in the field.

The resounding stillness gives the structures an impression of abandonment. Yet each time I turn down these streets, I can sense strangers behind the façades, holding their breath as they continue pursuits I will never know.

The air is dusty and stale, an atmosphere the years have forsaken. The floorboards are worn where once tread upon, the plaster walls yellowed to the color of the light bulbs.

The counter is scattered with paperclips. I pick up a handful, then take a seat at the table.

Paperclips must be a significant symbol or theme throughout both storylines; potentially connecting the two narratives together.

Silence falls over me like a fine dust.

No sound reaches my ears except for the murmur of the water.

Are rivers and/or the sound of them a significant connection as well?

you can tell a lot about a person’s character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate.

There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it’s only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.

the old man nibbled at one, looking like a terribly well-mannered cricket.

Nobody chooses to evolve. It’s like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what’s happening until they hit, then it’s too late.”

I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next. All quite simple, if you want to look at it that way. Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with. Hence I can live with it. But after I’m dead, can’t I just lie in peace? Those Egyptian pharaohs had a point, wanting to shut themselves up inside pyramids.

It’s been less than ten years since the whole Calcutec profession began, so nobody really knows what that life expectancy ought to be. Some say ten years, others twenty; either way you keep at it until the day you die. Did I really want to know how long? If it’s only a matter of time before you burn yourself out, all I can do is keep my muscles loose and my fingers crossed.

“Everyone may be ordinary, but they’re not normal.”

It is only the skull of an animal,

Skulls may be yet another connection point between the two storylines.

The skull is enveloped in a profound silence that seems nothingness itself. The silence does not reside on the surface, but is held like smoke within. It is unfathomable, eternal, a disembodied vision cast upon a point in the void. There is a sadness about it, an inherent pathos. I have no words for it.

“You must not let fatigue set in,” she warns. “That is what my mother said. Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”

On the sandbar midstream, the willows sway in the chill spring breeze. A hard-edged moon shines down on the cobblestones at our feet. The air is damp, the ground slick.

No doubt the Canals once conducted a brisk traffic of barges and launches, where now-stopped sluices expose dry channel beds, mud shriveling like the skin of a prehistoric organism.

A ritual interlude I like so much between the time I get into bed and the time I fall asleep.

A huge black net of sleep that had been poised in ambush fell over me.

I got the sneaking suspicion that I’d seen the skull before. But where? And how?

It sems that deja vu is a common thread here as well. Almost as if the two protagonists are connected by memory but not by consciousness.

Every time I go to town, I come back, like a squirrel in November, with mounds of little things.

Perhaps some fluctuation in the gravitational field had suddenly inundated the world with paperclips. Perhaps it was mere coincidence. I couldn’t shake the feeling that things weren’t normal. Was I being staked out by paperclips? They were everywhere I went, always just a glance away.

I am curious to understand the sigificance of paperclips in these two stories.

Then, on top of the TV, right next to the skull, I spread a handful of paperclips. Nice and artsy.

Intresting...

I had a unicorn skull on my hands.

So they are the same? Are the two worlds parallel or in sequnce?

For him, the game is not to defeat the opponent, but to challenge his own abilities.

the spectacle of spring has dissolved into summer, only to be eroded by the winter winds.

Strolling the Hill, one can imagine its former splendor: children playing gaily in the streets, piano music in the air, warm supper scents. Memories feign through scarcely perceived doors of my being.

“I haven’t even touched a baseball in fifteen years.” “I don’t know, I thought maybe I’d seen your face on TV. A ball game. Or maybe you were on the News?”

All the vague connections are intriguing. And is the librarian the same?

As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue.

My shuffling password was “End of the World.”

Of course it is. I am so curious how these people connect to each other. They obviously have a connection - I also would love to better undertand the timeline and how they line up in the end.

Birds resembling skylarks have built their nests in the fields; they fly up from the weeds to gyre the skies in search of food. Beasts, their heads and backs floating in this sea of grasses, sweep the landscape for edible green buds.

After I am through reading a skull,

Is this the concept that the prof. was a working on in the other narratve?

The meadow is embroidered in autumn flowers, the trees brilliant with crimson leaves, the Pool a mirror.

Winter birds take wing from the brambles and fly over the Wall to the south. The clouds sweep in low. Winter readies to lay siege.

from which my awareness gradually drifted inward like ice flowing together toward the middle of a lake.

As the menus were unfolding, sleep descended. All at once, as if the sky had fallen. Cello and cabin and cooking now dust to the wind, abandoning me, alone again, asleep like a tuna.

The dreamy ethereal writing is mind-bendng and extremely immersive. Beautiful!

it’d be the end of the world.” “The end of the world?”

Interesting!