Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

by Haruki Murakami

I always say—a prejudice on my part, I’m sure—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. It’s like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That’s how it goes.

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.

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.

As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue. The leaves turn color, the grasses wither; the beasts sense the advance of a long, hungry season. And bowing to their vision, I too know a sadness.

Yet once I turn from the Wall and set foot in the forest interior, there unfolds a mysteriously peaceful world. Infused with the life breath one senses in the wild, the Woods give me release. How can this be the minefield of dangers the old Colonel has warned me against? Here the trees and plants and tiny living things partake of a seamless living fabric; in every stone, in every clod of earth, one senses an immutable order.

Beside the mailboxes was a potted rubber plant, the ceramic container littered with popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. The rubber plant looked as worn out as I felt. Seemed like every passerby had heaped abuse on the poor thing. I didn’t know how long it’d been sitting there. I must have walked by it every day, but until I got knifed in the gut, I never noticed it was there.

“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.”

“How can the mind be so imperfect?” she says with a smile. I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose. “It may well be imperfect,” I say, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.” “Where do they lead?” “To oneself,” I answer. “That’s what the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.”

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

“Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It’s just a matter of drawing it out, isn’t it?

Genius doesn’t specialize; genius is reason in itself.” “Forget genius. It doesn’t do much for innocent bystanders. Especially if everyone’s going to want a piece of the action. That’s why this whole mess happened in the first place. Genius or fool, you don’t live in the world alone.

We were all getting old. That much was as plain as the falling rain.

The man immediately returned to his eggbeater disassembly. He had sorted screws of different sizes into clean white trays. They looked so happy. I returned to the car and listened to the Brandenburg Concertos while I waited. I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.

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.