The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami Quotes

“I think of human existence as being like a two-story house. On the first floor people gather together to take their meals, watch television, and talk. The second floor contains private chambers, bedrooms where people go to read books, listen to music by themselves, and so on. Then there is a basement; this is a special place, and there are a number of things stored here. We don’t use this room much in our daily life, but sometimes we come in, vaguely hang around the place. Then, my thought is that underneath that basement room is yet another basement room. This one has a very special door, very difficult to figure out, and normally you can’t get in there—some people never get in at all. . . . You go in, wander about in the darkness, and experience things there you wouldn’t see in the normal parts of the house. You connect with your past there, because you have entered into your own soul. But then you come back. If you stay over there for long you can never get back to reality. My sense is that a novelist is someone who can consciously do that sort of thing.”29”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“He made it a rule never to tell anyone the contents of stories he was still writing. It would be like a jinx. The moment the words left his mouth, a certain something would vanish like the morning dew. Subtle nuances would become superficial scenes. Secrets would no longer be secrets.34”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“one of the stated rules of the game for Murakami, who declared (ostensibly through Nietzsche) that “one cannot understand the gloom of the depths of night in the light of day.”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“This is why he urges Haida, despite the banality of the world around him, to live fully and find meaning in that process where he can. Midorikawa is not Mephistopheles tempting Haida with a choice, but an arhat acting out of an abundance of compassion; his purpose—to judge from the results—is to awaken Haida to his own special ability.”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“To think freely about things is also to separate ourselves from the flesh we are crammed into. To escape from that limiting cage that is our flesh, to break free of our chains and take flight into pure reason. In reason lies the natural life. That’s what is at the core of freedom of thought.” (66)”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“Barthes constructed his theory of what he called “myth,” describing essentially the same thing as we mean here by “narrative.” Barthes argues that modern, industrialized societies are governed in large part by such myths, constructed by each society’s political arm and disseminated via the mass media (the political arm’s propaganda machine) as commonsensical, therefore as absolutely real. For Barthes, myth is always political, always constructed, and at the same time always constitutive of our view of the world, and yet myth nearly always seeks to masquerade as something timeless, eternal, and “natural.” He says: Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving a historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. . . . The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with Nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short, a perceptible absence.42”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“Time may be looked at culturally as well, in terms of human historical development, as Jean Baudrillard does, and when it is viewed in this way, something interesting occurs: we see that time is not necessarily linear nor even unidirectional but may well move the way the wind does, now in this direction, now in that. Near the end of his admittedly esoteric work The Illusion of the End, in which he confronts the massive wave of revisionist history that accompanied the closing years of the twentieth century, Baudrillard has this to say: We have to accord a privileged status to all that has to do with non-linearity, reversibility, all that is of the order not of an unfolding or an evolution, but of a winding back, a reversion in time. Anastrophe versus catastrophe. Perhaps, deep down, history has never unfolded in a linear fashion; perhaps language has never unfolded in a linear fashion. Everything moves in loops, tropes, inversions of meaning, except in numerical and artificial languages which, for that very reason, no longer are languages.20”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others—coldly, efficiently, systematically. . . . Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.2”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“What few knew at the beginning, but many of us know now, is that this was a typical response on the part of this intensely individualistic man, who had attended Waseda in the late 1960s, at the height of the student riots in Tokyo, and joined in the violence but strictly as an independent; he refused to join any political group or faction but hurled stones at the police in his own right. Today we know Murakami as the man who went to Jerusalem to accept the Jerusalem Prize from the Israeli government and in his acceptance speech criticized the Israeli state for its military actions against civilians in Gaza, declaring to his hosts, in effect, that if they chose to bring their massive military and political power against the individuals protesting in the Gaza Strip, then, right or wrong, he would stand against them. This was his now famous declaration of the “wall and eggs” metaphor, in which powerful political systems are seen as a great stone wall, and individuals as eggs, hopelessly and rather suicidally hurling themselves against its implacable strength.”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“Murakami played with the formulas of mass literature—what is elsewhere termed formulaic fiction—but at the last minute subverted the expectations of those formulas and left the reader wondering what had just happened. This to some degree accounted for the peculiar sense of simultaneous thrill and discouragement one often felt at the end of some of these texts.”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“Tamura Kafka’s friend and protector Ōshima recognizes the risks of such constructs-turned-absolutes in Kafka on the Shore when dealing with activists who spout slogans of which they have no clear understanding, noting that “‘theses that take on lives of their own, empty slogans, usurped ideals, inflexible systems, these are what I fear most. . . . Narrow-mindedness and intolerance born of lack of imagination are like parasites; they change hosts and forms, but they go on living’” (1:314).”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“What this finally comes to mean, in slightly less elaborate terms, is (a) that historical discourse, like political discourse (and, as we shall see, journalistic discourse) is a series of decisions, of revisions, many or most of which are calculated to certain ends, while others are accidental; and (b) that myth treats these choices as inevitable, presents such discourses as faits accompli, thereby lending an apparently— but falsely—natural (predestined) grounding to choices that, ultimately, could have turned out otherwise. In a sense, this is also what Jacques Derrida sought to do through deconstruction: to challenge the center, or the grounding, of those “truths that we hold to be self-evident,” as the expression goes, to expose human constructs as constructs, and to “de-construct” (emphasis on the first syllable of construct, as a noun) ourselves, that is, rid ourselves of the burden of such assumptions. In exposing those “self-evident” groundings as fallacies, we encounter both the curse and the blessing of the shifting center: on the one hand we realize that all reality becomes somehow less reliable in the process, mutable as the center shifts, now this way, now that; on the other, we are liberated from constructs masquerading as absolute truths. Thus is all language politicized.43”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“As one of the central defining aspects of the “other world,” time will be discussed at some length in the chapter that follows; here I will note only that time, commonly taken to be an objective fact of the natural universe (chiefly due to the incontrovertible effects of deterioration and decay), is in fact a construct like any other, bound to language and culture and by no means absolute. We are fooled by time into granting it greater ontological status than it deserves because it may be divided and expressed uniformly through the symbolic system of mathematics. We speak of how long “a day” is on other planets and make adjustments for the rate of rotation and circumference of those planets, and yet in the end we are still playing with the clumsy tool of our arbitrary divisions of time, with hours and minutes, which can be made to divide one year on earth into 365 (almost perfectly) even days.”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“This is highlighted in the third chapter of this volume, dealing with concepts such as fate and free will, and establishing—partially via the arguments of chapter 1—that “fate” itself is by no means absolute; rather, as yet another construct grounded in language (which is itself always grounded in culture, in human perception), ideas like “fate” and “determinism” are used to deceive the individual into imagining he or she has no room to maneuver.”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami

“It is true, if you lose your ego, you also lose that consistent story that you call your self. But people cannot live long without a narrative. That is because the narrative is the means by which you transcend the logical system (or systematic logic) that surrounds and limits you; it is the key to sharing time and experience with others, a pressure valve. Of course, a narrative is a “story,” and “stories” are neither logic nor ethics. It is a dream you continue to have. You might, in fact, not even be aware of it. But, just like breathing, you continue incessantly to see this dream. In this dream you are just an existence with two faces. You are at once corporeal and shadow. You are the “maker” of the narrator, and at the same time you are the “player” who experiences the narrative.28”
― Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami