A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3)

by Haruki Murakami

“Back then, there was this girl who’d sleep with anyone.” That’s her name.

“I want you,” I said. “Okay,” she said. So we thrust our hands back into our coat pockets and slowly walked back to the apartment.

“Tell me, if I died, would you go out drinking like that?”

Yet no sooner had we thought we’d reached a lasting arrangement than something crumbled. The tiniest hint of something, but it was never to be recovered. We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end.

His regularity and nice-enoughness got ahead of him, excessively so. A typical case. Typically, however, people don’t think of themselves as typical cases.

Sure we’re tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C’mon now, there’s no honest work anywhere.

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

If you wanted to strike out against the world, you don’t go having children.

Now all I know about her is my memories of her. And these memories fade further and further into the distance like displaced cells.

Spiritual communion is not a recognized course of study.

The mother and child looked like a couple whose marriage was on the rocks.

The seat coverings had lost their pile and the cushions were like month-old bread. An air of doom, mixed with toilet and kerosene smells, filled the car.

A winter-dark wordless green pasture stretched between us.

Here I was, smack in the center of everything without a clue. At every turn, I’d been way off base, way off the mark. Of course, you could probably say the same thing about my whole life.

I dug my hands into my pockets and stood by the window, gazing out. There things unfolded entirely apart from me. Unrelated to my existence—unrelated to anybody’s existence—everything was flowing. The snow fell, the snow melted.