Murakami Connection

Never let fear and stupid pride make you lose someone who’s precious to you.

That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.

I did it because I'm a coward. I didn't have any confidence in myself as a woman. I was sure that no matter how much I loved you, you would never reciprocate. That's why I was able to cut you off so cruelly. I did it to sever my feelings for you. If I had only had a little more confidence and courage, and no stupid pride, and I never would have abandoned you like that, no matter what the circumstances.

In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.

He closed his eyes and, as if floating in water, drifted in that world of pain. Still, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It's when you can't even feel any pain anymore that you're in real trouble.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us knew anything substantial about the other.

We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we're surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.

Jealousy - at least as far as he understood it from his dream - was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn't make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

Tennessee Williams once wrote: "So much for the past and present. The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future." Yet when I look back on our dark voyage, I can see it only in terms of a nebulous "perhaps." All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us.

We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.

By the end of those three days the Rat's apartment was filled with empty cans and cigarette burns. He missed the woman like crazy. His whole being longed for her warmth. He wanted to enter her and stay there. Yet he could never go back. Face the music, he told himself. You're the one who burned the bridges. You're the one who plastered the walls and sealed yourself inside, right?

Since they had begun seeing each other, the Rat's life had turned into an endless repetition - each week was identical to the last. He had lost his sense of time. What was the date? The month? October, perhaps? He had no idea... He and the woman got together every Saturday, and he passed the next three days, from Sunday through Tuesday, mooning over that meeting. Thursday, Friday, and half of Saturday were devoted to planning their upcoming weekend. Only Wednesday didn't fit in; it was lost in space. Unable to move forward or backward. Wednesday...

Occasionally, ripples of emotion would lap against his heart as if to remind him of something. When that happened, he closed his eyes, clamped his heart shut, and waited for the emotions to recede. It was only a brief sensation, like the shadows that signal the coming of night. Once the ripples had passed, the quirt calm returned as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

When I go back to the town in summer, I walk the same streets we did and sit on the stone steps of the same warehouse and look at the ocean. Sometimes I want to cry, but the tears don't come. It's that kind of a thing.