Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

“What’s your line of work?” “Oh, computer-related business.” My standard reply. It wasn’t really a lie, and since most people don’t know much about computers, they generally don’t inquire any further.

Why did I cast off my past to come here to the End of the World? What possible event or meaning or purpose could there have been? Why can I not remember?

Unreasonably, my sorrow only seems to grow, to deepen. Whatever is the loss becomes greater each time we meet. It is a well that will never be filled. It is dark, unbearably so.

I have lost so many things. I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. Which part of me is thinking this?

Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

“No. Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”

Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.

Better not to think at all than to think halfway.

“That’s the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain.”

All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to. Is there not something marvelous about this? We hurt no one and no one gets hurt. No victory, no defeat.”

Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

People without a mind are phantoms.

This is the price of your perfection. A perfection that forces everything upon the weak and powerless.”

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

I will worry and suffer, grow old and die. I doubt you can understand, but I belong in that world, where I will be led around, even led astray, by my own mind.”

“Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but lose you.”

“I remember Mother told me that if one has mind, nothing is ever lost, regardless where one goes. Is that true?”

When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.

Then I hugged her one more time, to etch her warmth indelibly into my brain.

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.