The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

by Haruki Murakami

When you get used to that kind of life—of never having anything you want—then you stop knowing what it is you want.”

I felt as if all the fluids of my body might turn into tears and come streaming from my eyes, that my body itself might melt away like this. If it could have happened in the bliss of this marvelous light, even death would have been no threat. Indeed, I felt I wanted to die. I had a marvelous sense of oneness, an overwhelming sense of unity.

Gradually, I began to sense a quiet anger growing inside my body, an anger directed toward that something that remained invisible to me.