The deepest well

“The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.”

Haruki Murakami, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

Photo from here.

Hushed

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."

Haruki Murakami, 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

And, worst of all

"..Tengo went on. "I'm tired of living in hatred and resentment. I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself."

Page 410, Chapter 8: 'Time for the Cats to Come'
'1Q84', Haruki Murakami

Lunatic

"Hey, Tengo, do you know the difference between the English words 'lunatic' and 'insane'?, she asked.

"They're both adjectives describing mental abnormality. I'm not quite sure how they differ."

"'Insane' probably means to have an innate mental problem, something that calls for professional treatment, while 'lunatic' means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is 'moon' in Latin. In nineteenth century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced by a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like that actually existed. In other words, the fact that the moon can drive people crazy was actually recognized in law".

Page 307, 'What's the Point of its being a World that isn't There?'
From 'IQ84', Haruki Murakami

The Shape of that Darkness

To those of you who have wandered the dark passages of Murakami-land, and have wanted to "hide yourselves in dry wells" to shut the world out at times...

....................................................................................................................

"It's the birthday of Haruki Murakami, born in Kyoto, Japan (1949). Murakami's earliest memory is from when he was three years old. He escaped his house, fell into a nearby creek, and was saved by his mother just before he was swept into a tunnel. "I remember it very clearly, the coldness of the water and the darkness of the tunnel — the shape of that darkness. It's scary. I think that's why I'm attracted to darkness."

It's a memory he transmitted to a character in his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) and a motif — the metaphor of a dark and dangerous underground — he relies on in so many of his books that he forbid himself from writing about wells after his eighth one. Still, in his latest book, 1Q84 (2011), the plot pivots when a woman sitting in a traffic jam takes her cabbie's advice to take one of the secret, steep escape staircases hidden on the bridge they're sitting on. But, the driver warns her, once she goes through this portal, nothing will ever be the same again — and he's right.

As a teenager, Murakami read writers Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, and Raymond Carver obsessively and to the exclusion of Japanese literature, so that when he wrote own novel in his late 20s, he struggled so much that he wrote the beginning in English, then translated it back into Japanese. He has since translated the complete works of Raymond Carver into Japanese.
Murakami's books have many references to American pop culture like McDonald's and jazz. A huge baseball fan, Murakami was at a game when he had the sudden epiphany that he could write a novel after all, and he began that very night.

His books are known for a quality of magical realism where strange, unexpected, and unexplainable things happen — like the secret staircase that changes everything in 1Q84. But Murakami himself lives an extremely disciplined day-to-day life. He wakes early — sometimes as early as 2 a.m.; enters the "black box" of his creativity in an almost trance-like state, writing for several hours; eats healthful food; trains for marathons and swims; shies away from publicity; and goes to bed by 9 p.m"

The Writer's Almanac

Storm

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you.

So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

Haruki Murakami  'Kafka on the Shore'

A huge, empty museum

"Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself."

"I wrote a huge number of letters that spring: one a week to Naoko, several to Reiko, and several more to Midori. I wrote letters in the classroom, I wrote letters at my desk at home with Seagull in my lap, I wrote letters at empty tables during my breaks at the Italian restaurant. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life."

"If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom."
 
Haruki Murakami

Adrift

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else.

But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it.

Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."


The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

........................................................................................................

"Sometimes I feel so - I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.’ 

Like a little lost Sputnik?’ 

I guess so."

Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami

Mujo and the Appreciati​on of Beauty

From "Unrealistic Dreamer: Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech on receiving the Cataluña International Prize": http://www.senrinomichi.com/?p=2541

Note: The excerpt below is not the central theme of the speech, far from it - more on that later.

"....Notwithstanding this (the tsunami), there are 13 million people living “ordinary” lives in the Tokyo area alone. They take crowded commuter trains to go to their offices, and they work in skyscrapers. Even after this earthquake, I’ve never heard that the population of Tokyo is in decline.

Why? You might ask me. How can so many people live their daily lives in such a terrible place? Don’t they go out of their mind with fear?

In Japanese, we have the word “mujo”. It means that nothing lasts forever. Everything born into this world changes and will ultimately disappear. There is nothing eternal or immutable on which we can rely. This view of the world was derived from Buddhism, but the idea of “mujo” was burned into the spirit of Japanese people, and took root in the common ethnic consciousness.

The idea “everything has just gone” expresses resignation. We believe that it serves no purpose to go against nature, but Japanese people have found positive expressions of beauty in this resignation.

We love the cherry blossom of spring, the fireflies of summer and the red leaves of autumn. We think it natural that we watch them avidly, collectively and as a tradition. It can be difficult to make a hotel reservation near the famous sites of cherry blossom, fireflies and red leaves in their respective seasons, as such places are invariably milling with visitors.

Why?

Cherry blossoms, fireflies and red leaves lose their beauty within a very short time. We travel very far to watch the glorious moment. And we are somewhat relieved to confirm that they are not merely beautiful, but already beginning to fall, to lose their small lights and their vivid beauty. We find peace of mind in the fact that the peak of beauty has passed and disappeared.

I don’t know if natural disasters have affected such a mentality, but I’m sure that in some sense we have collectively overcome successive natural disasters and accepted things that we couldn’t avoid, by virtue of this mentality. "

It might be you

Ending of the last chapter of "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche", by Haruki Murakami

"In order that a second, and a third Ikuo Hayashi does not crop up, it is critical for our society to stop and consider, in all their ramifications, the questions brought to the surface so tragically by the Tokyo gas attack. Most people have put this incident behind them. "That' s over and done with", they say. "It was a major incident, but with the culprits all arrested it's wrapped up and doesn't have anything more to do with us."

However, we need to realize that most of the people who join cults are not abormal; they are not disadvantaged, they're not eccentrics. Thet are the people who live average lives (and maybe from the outside, more than average lives) who live in my neighbourhood. And in yours.

Maybe they think about things a little too seriously. Perhaps there's some pain they're carrying around inside. They're not good at making their feelings known to others and are somewhat troubled. They can't find a suitable means to express themselves, and bounce back and forth between feelings of pride and inadequacy.

They might very well be me. It might be you."

The Unicorn

"The Chinese unicorn is a sacred animal of portent. It ranks along with the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise as one of the Four Auspicious Creatures, and merits the highest status amongst the Three-Hundred-Sixty-Five Land Animals. Extremely gentle in temperament, it treads with such care that even the smallest living thing is unharmed, and eats no growing herbs but only withered grass. It lives a thousand years, and the visitation of a unicorn heralds the birth of a great sage. So we read that the mother of Confucius came upon a unicorn when she bore the philosopher in her womb:

Seventy years later, some hunters killed a qilin, which still had a bit of ribbon around its horn that Confucius' mother had tied there. Confucius went to look at the Unicorn and wept because he felt what the death of this innocent and mysterious animal foretold, and because in that ribbon lay his past.

The qilin appears again in Chinese history in the thirteenth century. On the eve of a planned invasion of India, advance scouts of Genghis Khan encounter a unicorn in the middle of the desert. This unicorn had the head of a horse and the body of a deer. Its fur is green and it speaks in a human tongue: "Time is come for you to return to the kingdom of your lord."

One of the Genghis's Chinese ministers, upon consultation, explained to him that the animal was a jiao-shui, a variety of qilin. "For four hundred years the great army has been warring in western regions, " he said. "Heaven, which has a horror of bloodshed, gives warning through the jiao-shui. Spare the Empire for Heaven's sake; moderation will give boundless pleasure." The Emperor desisted in his war plans."

Page 96,
'Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World', Haruki Murakami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn

"...The unicorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, and always mysteriously beautiful. He could be captured only by unfair means, and his single horn was said to neutralize poison."