Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami

Much later, I found out that the writer Agota Kristof had written a number of wonderful novels in a style that had a very similar effect. Kristof was a Hungarian citizen who escaped to Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1956 during the upheaval in her native country. There she had learned—or been forced to learn, really—French. Yet it was through writing in that foreign language that she succeeded in developing a style that was new and uniquely hers.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” So said a writer I bumped into back when I was a university student.

If one operates on the principle that everything can be a learning experience, then of course aging needn’t be so painful. That’s what they tell us, anyway.

Sadly, however, he could never fully grasp exactly what it was he was fighting against. In the final reckoning, I suppose, that’s what being sterile is all about.

Hartfield says this about good writing: “Writing is, in effect, the act of verifying the distance between us and the things surrounding us. What we need is not sensitivity but a measuring stick” (from What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, 1936).

My late grandmother used to say, “People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can’t dream at all.”

Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it.

A gulf separates what we attempt to perceive from what we are actually able to perceive. It is so deep that it can never be calculated, however long our measuring stick.

Pure art exists only in slave-owning societies. The Greeks had slaves to till their fields, prepare their meals, and row their galleys while they lay about on sun-splashed Mediterranean beaches, composing poems and grappling with mathematical equations. That’s what art is.

The Rat’s novel had two good things about it. First, there were no sex scenes; second, no one died. Guys don’t need any encouragement—left to themselves, they still die and sleep with girls. That’s just the way it is.

“Civilization is communication,” the doctor said. “That which is not expressed doesn’t exist.

It’s hard enough to talk about the dead under normal circumstances, but it’s even harder to talk about girls who have died young: by dying, they stay young forever.

“So the novel will be for myself. Or maybe for the cicadas.”

Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

I never saw the girl with four fingers on her left hand again. When I returned to the town that winter, she had quit the record shop and vacated her apartment. She vanished without a trace, swept away by the flow of time and its flood of people. When I go back to the town in summer, I walk the same streets we did and sit on the stone steps of the same warehouse and look at the ocean. Sometimes I want to cry, but the tears don’t come. It’s that kind of a thing.

How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?

J studied his fingertips for a minute. “I’ve been around for forty-five,” he said, “and all I know is this. We can learn from anything if we put in the effort. Right down to the most everyday, commonplace thing. I read somewhere that how we shave in the morning has its own philosophy, too. Otherwise, we couldn’t survive.”

His body was so tired that those unnameable feelings had left him, having found no place to take hold.

On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.

Whose memory went back a month? It was that kind of neighborhood.

“There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.”

She looked off into space, the sweet smile playing on her lips. It feels strange somehow, she said. Like none of it really happened. Oh, it happened all right. But now it’s gone. Does it make you sad? No, I said, shaking my head. There was something that came out of nothing, and now it’s gone back to where it came from, that’s all.

The Rat laughed and clicked his tongue. “See, J, it doesn’t work,” he said. “The way everyone pretends to be on the same wavelength without questioning or talking about things—it doesn’t get anyone anywhere. I hate to say it, but…I feel like I’ve been hanging around that kind of world too damn long.”