Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (1985 jp; 1991 en) (read in 2023)

“Libraries have certainly come a long way. The days of card pockets inside the backsleeves of books seemed like a faded dream. As a kid, I used to love all those withdrawal date stamps.”

“[…] felt like I was going to fade out any second, but I had to allow myself this luxury. A ritual interlude I like so much between the time I get into bed and the time I fall asleep. Having a drink in bed while listening to music and reading a book. As precious to me as a beautiful sunset or good clean air.”

“The River murmurs at my feet. There is the sandbar midstream, and on it the willows sway as they trail their long branches in the current. The water is beautifully clear. I can see fish playing among the rocks. Gazing at the River soothes me. Steps lead down from the bridge to the sandbar. A bench waits under the willows, a few beasts lay nearby. Often have I descended to the sandbar and offered crusts of bread to the beasts. At first they hesitated, but now the old and the very young eat from my hand. As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue. The leaves turn color, the grasses wither; the beasts sense the advance of a long, hungry season. And bowing to their vision, I too know a sadness.”

“The hulk didn’t bother removing his shoes before trudging into the kitchen and swinging around to pull out the chair opposite me.”

““You are fevered,” she says. “Where on the earth have you gone?”

“I find it impossible to answer. I am without words. I cannot even comprehend what it is she asks. She brings several blankets and wraps me in them. I lie by the stove. Her hair touches my cheek. I do not want her to go away. I cannot tell if the thought is mine or if it has floated loose from some fragment of memory. I have lost so many things. I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. Which part of me is thinking this?”

“Until this moment the memory, it seemed, had been sealed off from the sludge of my consciousness by an intervening force. An intervening force? Or an operation, like the one done on my brain to give me shuffling faculty. They had shoved memories out of my conscious awareness. They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn’t care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self.”

““Well, there’s your cognitive system for y’. You just can’t say all at once. Accordin’ t’what you’re up against, almost instantaneously, you elect some point between the extremes. That’s the precision programming you’ve got built in. You yourself don’t know a thing about the inner shenanigans of that program. ’Tisn’t any need for you t’know. Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us.”

““Pursue this much further and we enter into theological issues. The bottom line here, if you want t’call it that, is whether human actions are plotted out in advance by the Divine, or self-initiated beginnin’ to end. Of course, ever since the modern age, science has stressed the physiological spontaneity of the human organism. But soon’s we start askin’ just what this spontaneity is, nobody can come up with a decent answer.”

“Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin’ for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s makin’ a straight line for the brain. No dodgin’ it, not for anyone. People have t’die, the body has t’fall. Time is hurlin’ that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin’, thought goes on subdividin’ that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.””

“Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn’t imagine not doing things the same. After all, everything—this life I was losing—was me. And I couldn’t be any other self but my self. Could I?”

“[…] like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was “despair.” What Turgenev called “disillusionment.” Or Dostoyevsky, “hell.” Or Somerset Maugham, “reality.” Whatever the label, I figured it was me.”

“Pat Boone sang softly, I’ll Be Home. Time seemed to flow in the wrong direction, which was fine by me. Time could go whichever way it pleased.”

“The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha’s insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life.”

“[…] picturing the planet earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the clutter—those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international dateline and the equator, those nagging details that arise from the spherical view. I mean, for a guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence, how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?”

“What the hell could the Brass be thinking? You dig a hole and the next thing they say is fill it in; fill it in and they tell you to dig a hole. They’re always screwing with the guy in the field.”

““To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called ‘mind,’ what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.”

““The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.””

“No doubt the Canals once conducted a brisk traffic of barges and launches, where now-stopped sluices expose dry channel beds, mud shriveling like the skin of a prehistoric organism. Weeds have rooted in cracks of the loading docks, broad stone steps descending to where the waterline once was. Old bottles and rusted machine parts poke up through the mire; a flat-bottom boat slowly rots nearby.”

“[…] felt like I was going to fade out any second, but I had to allow myself this luxury. A ritual interlude I like so much between the time I get into bed and the time I fall asleep. Having a drink in bed while listening to music and reading a book. As precious to me as a beautiful sunset or good clean air.”

“Libraries have certainly come a long way. The days of card pockets inside the backsleeves of books seemed like a faded dream. As a kid, I used to love all those withdrawal date stamps.”

“I study the chessboard and concede defeat. “You can gain yourself five moves,” says the Colonel. “Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.”

““Then give me a moment,” I say.”

“The River murmurs at my feet. There is the sandbar midstream, and on it the willows sway as they trail their long branches in the current. The water is beautifully clear. I can see fish playing among the rocks. Gazing at the River soothes me. Steps lead down from the bridge to the sandbar. A bench waits under the willows, a few beasts lay nearby. Often have I descended to the sandbar and offered crusts of bread to the beasts. At first they hesitated, but now the old and the very young eat from my hand. As the autumn deepens, the fathomless lakes of their eyes assume an ever more sorrowful hue. The leaves turn color, the grasses wither; the beasts sense the advance of a long, hungry season. And bowing to their vision, I too know a sadness.”

““There is no beyond,” she says. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.””

“Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn’t stop it. I was going to sleep.”

“The hulk didn’t bother removing his shoes before trudging into the kitchen and swinging around to pull out the chair opposite me.”

“Junior didn’t say a word, choosing instead to contemplate the lit end of his cigarette. This was where the Jean-Luc Godard scene would have been titled Il regardait le feu de son tabac. My luck that Godard films were no longer fashionable. When the tip of Junior’s cigarette had transformed into a goodly increment of ash, he gave it a measured tap, and the ash fell on the table. For him, an ashtray was extraneous.”

““You are fevered,” she says. “Where on the earth have you gone?”

“I find it impossible to answer. I am without words. I cannot even comprehend what it is she asks. She brings several blankets and wraps me in them. I lie by the stove. Her hair touches my cheek. I do not want her to go away. I cannot tell if the thought is mine or if it has floated loose from some fragment of memory. I have lost so many things. I am so tired. I feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. I am overcome by the sensation that I am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. Which part of me is thinking this?”

“[…] remove the inner sole of one, conceal the map, and replace the sole. I approach the Colonel again. “The Gatekeeper is not someone I can trust. Will you see that my shadow receives these?””

“I gently place both hands upon the skull and stare, waiting for a warm glow to emanate. When it reaches a certain temperature—like a patch of sun in winter—the white-polished skull offers up its old dreams. I strain my eyes and breathe deeply, using my fingertips to trace the intricate lines of the tale it commences to tell. The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the dome of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture. There would be a landscape I have not seen before, unfamiliar melodic echoes, whisperings in a chaos of tongues. They drift up fitfully and as suddenly sink into darkness. Between one fragment and the next there is nothing in common. I experiment with ways to concentrate my energies into my fingertips, but the outcome never varies. For while I recognize that the old dreams relate to something in me, I am lost.”

““Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It’s just a matter of drawing it out, isn’t it? But school doesn’t know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It’s no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.””

“I kept thinking about that young couple in the Skyline, Duran Duran on stereo. Oblivious to everything. I wished I could have been a little more oblivious. I put myself in the driver’s seat, woman sitting next to me, cruising the late night streets to an innocuous pop beat. Did the woman take off her bracelets during sex? Nice if she didn’t. Even if she was naked, those two bracelets needed to be there.”

“The aged Devil sat on a rock by the side of a Finnish country road. The Devil was ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand years old, and very tired. He was covered in dust. His whiskers were wilting.

“Whither be ye gang in sich ’aste? the Devil called out to a Farmer.

“Done broke me ploughshare and must to fixe it, the Farmer replied.

“Not to hurrie, said the Devil, the sunne still play es o’erhead on highe, wherefore be ye scurrying? Sit ye doun and ‘eare m’ tale. The Farmer knew no good could come of passing time with the Devil, but seeing him so utterly haggard, the Farmer […]”

“Until this moment the memory, it seemed, had been sealed off from the sludge of my consciousness by an intervening force. An intervening force? Or an operation, like the one done on my brain to give me shuffling faculty. They had shoved memories out of my conscious awareness. They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn’t care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self.”

“You know the old saying: When the sun leaks through again, patch the roof for rain.”

““Well, there’s your cognitive system for y’. You just can’t say all at once. Accordin’ t’what you’re up against, almost instantaneously, you elect some point between the extremes. That’s the precision programming you’ve got built in. You yourself don’t know a thing about the inner shenanigans of that program. ’Tisn’t any need for you t’know. Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us.”

““Pursue this much further and we enter into theological issues. The bottom line here, if you want t’call it that, is whether human actions are plotted out in advance by the Divine, or self-initiated beginnin’ to end. Of course, ever since the modern age, science has stressed the physiological spontaneity of the human organism. But soon’s we start askin’ just what this spontaneity is, nobody can come up with a decent answer.”

““The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn’t represent an accurate mappin’, but viewin’ an accurate, random succession of images didn’t much help us either. Anyway, this ‘visual edition’ proved quite convenient for graspin’ the whole picture.”

““You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631 … Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick.”

“Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin’ for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s makin’ a straight line for the brain. No dodgin’ it, not for anyone. People have t’die, the body has t’fall. Time is hurlin’ that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin’, thought goes on subdividin’ that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.””

““It’s something that struck me only recently. I was just seein’ where my research would take me and I ran smack into this one. That expandin’ human time doesn’t make you immortal; it’s subdividin’ time that does the trick.””

““Still, it’s nothing t’fear,” the Professor philosophized. “It’s not death. It’s eternal life. And you get t’be yourself. Compared to that, this world isn’t but a momentary fantasy. Please don’t forget that.””

“Everything wheeled around closer and farther, closer and farther, like a merry-go-round. When was it those two had come and done their dirty work on my belly? It had to have been before I was sitting at the supermarket snack bar—or no? When had I last pissed? Why did I care?”

““Your shadow is on the verge of death. A person has the right to see his own shadow under these circumstances. There are rules about this. The Town observes the passing of a shadow as a solemn event, and the Gatekeeper does not interfere. There is no reason for him to interfere.””

“As if I really believed that. It’d been fifteen years since Jim Morrison died, and never once had I come across a Doors taxi. There are things that change in this world and things that don’t. Department stores haven’t stopped piping in Raimond Lefebvre Orchestra Muzak, beer halls still play to polkas, shopping arcades play Ventures’ Christmas carols from mid-November.”

“I took a seat to wait my turn, Lufthansa bag on my knee. It looked like I was next in line. Great. A guy can only watch somebody else’s clothes revolve for so long. Especially on his last day. I sprawled out in the chair and gazed off into space. The laundromat had that particular detergent and clothes-drying smell. Contrary to my expectations, none of the driers opened up. There are unwritten rules about laundromats and “The watched drier never stops” is one of them. From where I sat, the clothes looked perfectly dry, but the drums didn’t know when to quit.”

“Even if I had my life to live over again, I couldn’t imagine not doing things the same. After all, everything—this life I was losing—was me. And I couldn’t be any other self but my self. Could I?”

“[…] like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was “despair.” What Turgenev called “disillusionment.” Or Dostoyevsky, “hell.” Or Somerset Maugham, “reality.” Whatever the label, I figured it was me.”

“I leaned one elbow on the table and considered the clock. Watching the hands of a clock advance is a meaningless way to spend time, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?”

““I remember Mother told me that if one has mind, nothing is ever lost, regardless where one goes. Is that true?”

““I don’t know,” I tell her. “But true or not, that is what your mother believed. The question is whether you believe it.”

““I think I can,” she says, gazing into my eyes.

““You can?” I ask, startled. “You think you can believe that?”

““Probably,” she says. “No. Think it over carefully. This is very important,” I say, “because to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. Do you follow? When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind. Do you know these things?””

““It is like looking for lost drops of rain in a river.”

““You’re wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this.”

““I believe you,” she whispers after a moment. “Please find my mind.””

“The man immediately returned to his eggbeater disassembly. He had sorted screws of different sizes into clean white trays. They looked so happy.”

““Good butter sauce is an art,” I said. “It takes time. You stir finely minced shallots into melted butter, then heat it over a very low flame. No shortcuts.”

““Ah yes, you like to cook, don’t you?”

““Well, I used to. You need real dedication. Fresh ingredients, a discerning palate, an eye for presentation. It’s not a modern art. Good cooking has hardly evolved since the nineteenth century.””

“Pat Boone sang softly, I’ll Be Home. Time seemed to flow in the wrong direction, which was fine by me. Time could go whichever way it pleased.”

“The clothes on the floor, the music, the conversation. Round and round it goes, and where it stops everyone knows. Like a dead heat on the merry-go-round. No one pulls ahead, no one gets left behind. You always get to the same spot.”

“She poured wine into both our glasses.

““What time is it?” I asked.

““Nighttime,” she answered.”

“When have I last heard a song? My body has craved music. I have been so long without music, I have not even known my own hunger. The resonance permeates; the strain eases within me. Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.”

“The girl was amazing. She was half my age, and she could handle things ten times better than me. I set down the receiver with a tinge of sadness, knowing I’d never see her again. I was watching the chandeliers get carried out of a once-grand hotel, now bankrupt. One by one the windows are sealed, the curtains taken down.”

““I watched you coming back from the kitchen just now,” I said.

““Did I pass?”

““You’ve got great legs.”

““You like them?”

““A whole lot.”

“She put her glass down on the table and kissed me below the ear. “Did I ever tell you?” she said. “I love compliments.””

“FM station on low, Roger Williams playing Autumn Leaves, that time of year.”

“I didn’t mean to be nosy, but everything seemed meaningful. Autumn in New York, by the Frank Chacksfield Orchestra,”

“Woody Herman swinging into Early Autumn.”

“Duke Ellington would be right even for New Year’s Eve at an Antarctic base. I drove along, whistling to Lawrence Brown’s trombone solo on Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me, followed by Johnny Hodges on Sophisticated Lady.”

“The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. Was I any closer to appreciating Alyosha’s insights? Some limited happiness had been granted this limited life.”

“Bob Dylan was singing A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, over and over.”