Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

“I’d say my mind is average, though, so I’ve never found it inconvenient.”

Her tone is businesslike, but I can tell that in her book, I pass.

I’m safe inside this container called me. With a little click, the outlines of this being—me—fit right inside and are locked neatly away. Just the way I like it. I’m where I belong.

At most my consciousness and I parted company for a few hours.

Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology . . . But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.

I’m not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don’t enjoy the writing, I stop.

“Don’t worry,” Oshima laughs. “I’m not going have an accident. I’m a careful driver and don’t push it. I keep my car in top condition, too. Besides, when I die I want to die quietly, all by myself.” “Taking someone else with you, then, isn’t an option either.” “You got it.”

Just something to fill our stomachs, is the best you could say about it.

We fall silent, each of us filling in the silence with our own random thoughts.

School and I had sort of a mutual hate relationship going.

I file that away for future reference.

With a brain like his, the only result he got from thinking too much was a headache.

“If that makes it easier for you, then go ahead and think that. It doesn’t matter.”

The man’s features weren’t as unusual as his clothes. He was somewhere between young and old, handsome and ugly.

“Well, if that helps you understand me, feel free to think so. Or not.

“I want you to do something for me.” “Is it something that Nakata can do?” “I never ask the impossible. That’s a colossal waste of time, don’t you agree?”

Like it was lying in wait for me, silence wraps itself around me tightly once I’m alone.

I close my eyes but can’t fall asleep, my body dying for rest while my mind’s wide awake.

You’re afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

“When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. Nobody cares whether you like killing other people or not. It’s just something you have to do. Otherwise you’re the one who gets killed.” Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata’s chest. “Bang!” he said. “Human history in a nutshell.”

man’s life is one long farewell, as they say.”

If I sound like I’m always predicting ominous things, it’s because I’m a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes winds up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality’s just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life.

The library is quiet enough most of the time, but on a day like this when it’s closed it’s like the land that time forgot. Or more like a place that’s holding its breath, hoping time won’t stumble upon it.

I try imagining myself in forty years, but it’s like trying to picture what lies beyond the universe.

Strong and independent? I’m neither one. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.

asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”

She takes in a breath and pauses. The expression on her face slowly retreats somewhere far away, then comes back. Kind of like a parade that disappears down a street, then marches back up the same street toward you again.

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

“At the same time that ‘I’ am the content of a relation, ‘I’ am also that which does the relating.”

The kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building you find in any city, the kind Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing.

I feel like I’m exactly where I belong. When I’m with Mr. Nakata I can’t be bothered with all this Who am I? stuff. Maybe this is going overboard, but I bet Buddha’s followers and Jesus’ apostles felt the same way.

‘Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.’”

was, as advertised, totally unobtrusive. Turn away from it for a moment and every memory of what it looked like vanished. A notable achievement in the field of anonymity.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow—they’d all blur into one. Like an anchorless ship, time floats aimlessly across the broad sea.

“Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,” Crow tells me. “War breeds war.

“A theory that still doesn’t have any good counterevidence is one worth pursuing.

Wordlessly he continued as he was, dead.

The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.

She looks fixedly at me but doesn’t answer. It’s like my question’s taken a wrong turn and been sucked into some nameless space.

Again my question’s taken a wrong turn and vanished.

Time came slowly and passed slowly, so leisurely that at times he could swear it had stealthily doubled back on itself.

“I guess lazy’s my middle name,” Hoshino explained to the stone. “And when things get sticky I tend to head for the door. Not to brag or anything, but I’m pretty quick on my feet. I’ve never followed anything to the bitter end. Which is sort of a problem, I suppose.”

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it.