After the Quake

by Haruki Murakami

When he came home from work that Sunday, the sixth day, his wife had disappeared.

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“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself,” Shimao said.

“It’s true,” he said. “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere.”

The flames accepted all things in silence, drank them in, understood, and forgave. A family, a real family, was probably like this, she thought.

Why did he come in so often, even if he did live close by? Why didn’t he just buy lots of milk and beer and keep it in the refrigerator? Wouldn’t that be more convenient?

Keinget di drakor my liberation notes, cowokny tiap malem beli alkohol

“Tell me, Mr. Miyake, when you see the shapes that a bonfire makes, do you ever feel kind of strange?” “How so?” “I don’t know, it’s like all of a sudden you get very clear about something people don’t usually notice in everyday life. I don’t know how to put it, I’m not smart enough, but watching the fire now, I get this deep, quiet kind of feeling.”

“a fire can be any shape it wants to be. It’s free. So it can look like anything at all depending on what’s inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that’s because it’s showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself.

Premonitions can stand for something else sometimes. And the thing they stand for can be a lot more intense than reality. That’s the scariest thing about having a premonition.

“But there’s such a thing as a way of living that’s guided by the way a person’s going to die.”

I could never live with this man, she thought. I could never get inside his heart. But I might be able to die with him.

Even after Yoshiya had entered middle school and begun to take an interest in things sexual, she would continue to walk around the house wearing skimpy underwear—or nothing at all. They slept in separate bedrooms, of course, but whenever she felt lonely at night she would crawl under his covers with almost nothing on.

Ini ibunya kenapa sumpah....

He recalled all too vividly her profound heartbreak and distress when he announced at the age of thirteen that he was abandoning the faith.

Mereka nih bagian dr cult...??

“Your father is our Lord” (which is how they referred to their god).

Yoshiya kayak jesus dan ibunya bunda maria....

And besides, thought Yoshiya, if it was all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I’m sure I’ll never see it again.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

“Strange and mysterious things, though, aren’t they—earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being ‘down to earth’ or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn’t true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be so solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid. I heard it on the TV news: ‘liquefaction,’ they call it, I think.

I spent thirty-three years as another man’s shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is that you yourself really want out of life.”

When you are with a person for a long time and following his orders, in a sense you become one with him, like husband and wife.

GASP did he.... with his employer....

From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.”

There are those who say that ‘understanding’ is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings,

“Worm lives underground. He is a gigantic worm. When he gets angry, he causes earthquakes,” Frog said. “And right now he is very, very angry.”

Remembered smth in suzume about worm... What is it called.... Ikan lele butin japanese way...

As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination.

The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats. Each and every one of us is a being of limited duration: all of us eventually go down to defeat. But as Ernest Hemingway saw so clearly, the ultimate value of our lives is decided not by how we win but by how we lose.

My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me. Inside me is the un-me.

Sayoko said, “To understand something and to put that something into a form you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, though, living would be a lot simpler.”

I’ve never had a friend like you before. You give me so much. I hope you realize that.” “So much, but not enough,” he said.

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“You’re right on the mark. I don’t deny it. I’m ruining my own life. But I’m telling you, Junpei, I couldn’t help it. There was no way I could put a stop to it. I don’t know any better than you do why it had to happen. There’s no way to justify it, either. It just happened. And if not here and now, something like it would have happened sooner or later.”

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