Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light.

Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved.

Could I have given happiness to anyone else?

The early autumn sun glinted on the water, an enormous mirror ground to powder and scattered.

I thought about rain myself. A mist so fine, it almost wasn’t rain. Falling, ever fair, ever equal, it gradually covered my consciousness in a filmy, colorless curtain. Sleep had come.

SNOW is falling heavily by the time we reach our destination. The sky presses, thick and solid, upon us. The mass of swirling flecks gravitates toward the Southern Pool, an unblinking eye in a world of white. Or does the Pool beckon the flurries down, only to drink them under?

The Wall is here to hold me in, the River flows through me, the smoke is me burning.

“Maybe you can’t die here, but you will not be living. You will merely exist. There is no ‘why’ in a world that would be perfect in itself.

The water is as tranquil and blue as the eyes of the beasts. I am alone at the furthest periphery of existence. Here the world expires and is still.

All that is left to me is the sound of the snow underfoot.