Are you familiar with it? Japanese folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body.
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Kafka On The Shore
Coming this October: Killing Commendatore, the much-anticipated new novel from Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers. Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafk
Characters
There's a difference between loss and lack. I suppose it's like—well, imagine a train streaming down a track. The freight's disappeared from one of the cars. A car that's empty inside—that's loss. When the whole car itself has vanished, that's lack.
I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and image a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here—me included—will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust.
Slowly, like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.
I'm safe inside this container called me. With a little click, the outlines of this being—me—fit right inside and are locked neatly away. Just the way I like it. I'm where I belong.
Once you're lost, you panic. You're in total despair, not knowing what to do. I hate it when that happens.
I'm free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can't really understand what it means. All I know is I'm totally alone . . . Is this what it means to be free? I don't know, and I give up thinking about it.
Face it, I remind myself—there're tons of things you don't have a clue about.
There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.
My point is that it's really hard for people to live their lives alone.
In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife a…
That things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there's no such thing as coincidence.
It's all pointless—assuming you try to find a point to it. We're coming from somewhere, heading somewhere else. That's all you need to know, right?
A rest area on a highway is just a place you pass through. To get from here to there.
A mechanism inside of you.
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news yo…
You seek a voice, but what do you get? Silence. You look for silence, but guess what? All you hear over and over and over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice pushes a secret switch hidden deep inside your brain.
The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in—and it doesn't have to be very big—is nowhere to be found.
A dark omnipresent pool of water. It was probably always there, hidden away somewhere. But when the time comes it silently rushes out, chilling every cell in your body. You drown in that cruel flood, gasping for breath. You cling to a vent near the ceiling, struggling, but the air you manage to brea…
It's like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that's half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness.