The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?

“If all they did was lend out knowledge for free, what would the payoff be for them?”

The sheep man has his world. I have mine. And you have yours, too. Am I right?

So just because I don’t exist in the sheep man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all.

“Our worlds are all jumbled together—your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. That’s what you mean, right?”

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

“The world follows its own course,” he said. “Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”

At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.

My mother died last Tuesday. She had been suffering from a mysterious illness, and that morning she quietly slipped away. There was a simple funeral, and now I am totally alone. No mother. No pet starling. No sheep man. No girl. I lie here by myself in the dark at two o’clock in the morning and think about that cell in the library basement. About how it feels to be alone, and the depth of the darkness surrounding me. Darkness as pitch black as the night of the new moon.