First Person Singular: Stories

by Haruki Murakami

As you can imagine, there were plenty of things in the world that I didn’t know about.

But sometimes, without even realizing it, we trample on people’s feelings, hurt their pride, make them feel bad.

“There’s nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily.” Then, as if starting a new paragraph, he briefly cleared his throat. “But, when you put in that much time and effort, if you do achieve that difficult thing it becomes the cream of your life.”

Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first.

“Things like this happen sometimes in our lives,” I told him. “Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing. I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them. As if we were passing under a huge wave.”

I always come back to that circle—the circle with many centers but no circumference.

Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn’t yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.

“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,”

that I was impressed that such a bland name was, for her, precious and important. A simple name can sometimes really jolt a person’s heart.

As I consider that we’ll never meet again I also consider how there’s no reason that we cannot Will we meet or will it simply end like this drawn by the light trampled by shadows

Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely), people age in the blink of an eye. Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?

this music Bird played just for me in my dream felt less like a stream of sound than like a momentary, total irradiation.

“Death always comes on suddenly,” Bird said. “But it also takes its time. Like the beautiful phrases that come into your head. It lasts an instant, yet those instants can draw out forever.

The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being. Sometimes it all seems so unfair.

An ideological impasse

And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.

“Sometimes it hurts a lot to be so jealous.”

It may well be the ultimate form of romantic love. But it’s also the ultimate form of loneliness. Like two sides of a coin. The two extremes are stuck together, and can never be separated.”

“I believe that love is the indispensable fuel that allows us to go on living. Someday that love may end. Or it may never amount to anything. But even if love fades away, even if it’s unrequited, you can still hold on to the memory of having loved someone, of having fallen in love with someone. And that’s a valuable source of warmth. Without that heat source a person’s heart—and a monkey’s heart, too—would turn into a bitterly cold, barren wasteland. A place where not a ray of sunlight falls, where the wildflowers of peace, the trees of hope, have no chance to grow.

It felt like bits of reality and unreality were randomly changing places.

No matter how vivid memories may be, they can’t win out against the power of time.

CARNAVAL

First of all, there aren’t that many ugly women who realize they’re ugly, and those who do go on to take some pleasure in their ugliness are certainly a minuscule fraction. In that sense, I think she was unique. And it was that very uniqueness that drew people to her.

beautiful women, the majority of them at least, never seem able to truly, unconditionally, derive pleasure in being gorgeous.

No matter how beautiful a woman might be, she always has imperfections, and likewise no matter how ugly a woman might be, there’s always a part of her that is beautiful.

What we have there is a choice between two alternatives, and only two—we either wholly accept it, unconditionally, as something that is what it is, or we completely reject it. Like a take-no-prisoners type of war.

In the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and I think the same applies to women’s faces in terms of beauty or ugliness. I believe (and please take this for what it is, just my personal view) that beautiful woman can be summed up by simply being “beautiful.” Each one of them is carrying around a single beautiful, golden-haired monkey on her back. There might be a slight difference in the luster and shade of their fur, but the brilliance they share makes them all seem one and the same. In contrast, ugly women each carry around their own individual version of a shaggy monkey. There are small, but significant, differences in their monkeys—how worn their fur is, where their fur has thinned out, how dirty they are. There’s no brilliance at all, so unlike the golden-haired monkeys, our eyes are not dazzled by them.

Schumann’s Carnaval,

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s recording for Angel Records, and mine was Arthur Rubinstein’s RCA recording.

“All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”

Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can—that’s what’s the most valuable.