Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami

Give up trying to write something sophisticated, I told myself. Forget all those prescriptive ideas about “the novel” and “literature” and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like.

Nice advice

Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle. It also led me to discover that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”

If one operates on the principle that everything can be a learning experience, then of course aging needn’t be so painful.

In the end, writing is not a full step toward self-healing, just a tiny, very tentative move in that direction.

All the same, writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.

“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.

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.

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.

“May I ask one question?” “Certainly.” “What have you learned?” The air around him shook as the wind laughed. Then eternal silence descended once more to the Martian plain. The young man took a revolver from his pocket, placed it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger.

Wow kaget

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.

What lying here in bed for the past three years has taught me is that, however miserable your situation, there is always something to learn, and that helps me go on living one day at a time.

So many lights were shining up there on the mountainside. I couldn’t tell which one of them was yours, of course. Some lights shone from poor people’s houses, some from the mansions of the wealthy. There were the lights of hotels, of schools, of companies. So many people, so many ways of life.

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

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

“Sad?” one of them asked. I nodded. “Then sleep,” said the other. So I slept.

Each of us had, to a greater or lesser degree, resolved to live according to his or her own system. If another person’s way of thinking was too different from mine, it made me mad; too close, and I got sad. That’s all there was to it.

“Well, it doesn’t make sense to me.” “That’s the best way to handle it. Admit that you don’t understand and leave it at that.”

“I’ve lived twenty-five years, and I don’t feel like I’ve learned a damn thing.”

“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.”

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.

When you stripped something down layer by layer, what remained in the end? The Rat didn’t know. Pride?…

It seemed that no one could live without pride. If that was all one had left, though, it was too dark. Way too dark.

“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.”