this book was secondhand sold in minneapolis and then made its way to be secondhand sold in manhattan
i like the way dreams are written in this book. very worthy of emulation in my own dream journaling
i like that i was thinking the book was very pynchonesque and then the back cover review says it's like pynchon.
some day i will go to the yamanote circle line with a book and just ride it around and around for a day
update: august 2025 i did this it wasn't that fun
the feeling of things inside reminds me of that one guy from jjk
i like the newspaper snippets a lot
zoo bit is excellent.
A few small clouds floated in the sky, their shapes clear and precise, like the clouds in medieval engravings.
“Uh-huh.” I wanted to motion toward our house, but I had turned so many odd angles to get here that I no longer knew exactly where it was. I ended up pointing at random.
“That’s all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don’t have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far out you can’t follow them all the way to the end.”
“It’s blank,” Malta Kano said to me.
I was still staring at the back of her name card.
“Just my name. There is no need for me to include my address or telephone number. No one ever calls me. I am the one who makes the calls.”
Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.
Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
“I began to cry a lot. In the afternoons I would go to a park-the Shin-juku Imperial Gardens or Yoyogi Park-to sit on the grass and cry. Sometimes I would cry for an hour or two at a time, sobbing out loud. Passersby would stare at me, but I didn’t care. I wished that I had died that time, that I had ended my life on the night of May twenty-ninth. How much better off I would be! But now I could not even die. In my numbness, I lacked the strength to kill myself. I felt nothing: no pain, no joy. All feeling was gone. And I was not even me.”
“Of course not. Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It’s, like, his fate. That’s why the wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they’re like drug dealers. Once they get their hooks into a guy, he’s a customer for life. Have you ever heard of a. bald guy suddenly growing a head of hair? I never have. A wig’s got to cost half a million yen at least, maybe a million for a tough one. And you need a new one every two years! Wow! Even a car lasts longer than that-four or five years. And then you can trade it in!”
He preferred to take his own life rather than let that happen. So one day when he saw a GI stop a jeep in front of his house, he blew his brains out on the spot. He would have preferred to slit his stomach open the old-fashioned samurai way, but there was no time for that. His wife hanged herself in the kitchen to ‘accompany’ her husband in death.”
“Wow.”
“Anyhow, it turned out the GI was just an ordinary GI, looking for his girlfriend. He was lost. He wanted to ask somebody directions. You know how tough it is to find your way around that place. Deciding it’s your time to die-that can’t be easy for anybody.”
“She filled the tub, stuck her face in, and drowned herself. You realize, of course, that to die that way, you have to be pretty damned determined.”
I must say, I was utterly shocked to receive such a letter from Mr. Honda. I had been out of touch with him for years-perhaps six or seven years without a word. I wrote back to him immediately, but my reply crossed in the mails with the notice from his son that Mr. Honda had died.” He took a sip of his green tea.
And that is that we were just ordinary young men, the same as you. I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream.
Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale, as I said earlier, than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could fully comprehend. As I sat and watched, the feeling overtook me that my very life was slowly dwindling into nothingness. There was no trace here of anything as insignificant as human undertakings. This same event had been occurring hundreds of millions-hundreds of billions-of times, from an age long before there had been anything resembling life on earth. Forgetting that I was there to stand guard, I watched the dawning of the day, entranced.
I went so far as to regret that the Mongolian noncom had not simply shot me and gotten it over with. If I had been killed that way, at least they would have been aware of my death. If I died here, however, it would be a truly lonely death, a death of no concern to anyone, a silent death.
“The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” May Kasahara said, looking into my eyes. “Go home and take a good look in the mirror.”
interesting bc he has this quote from [[What I Talk About When I Talk About Running]] “Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act”
From the first day I met you I knew better than to hope you might amount to anything. I saw no sign of promise, nothing in you that suggested you might accomplish something worthwhile or even turn yourself into a respectable human being: nothing there to shine or to shed light on anything. I knew that whatever you set your hand to would end up half-baked, that you would never see anything through to the end. And I was right. You have been married to my sister for six years, and what have you done in all that time? Nothing, right? All you’ve accomplished in six long years is to quit your job and ruin Kumiko’s life. Now you’re out of work and you have no plans for the future. There’s nothing inside that head of yours but garbage and rocks.
“Two and a half months,” I said. “How could it have been going on for two and a half months and I didn’t notice a thing?”
“Because, Mr. Okada, you had absolutely no doubts about your wife,” said Malta Kano.
I nodded. “That’s true. It never once crossed my mind. I never imagined Kumiko could lie to me like that, and I still can’t really believe it.”
“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”
When she set the hat on her head, Malta Kano conveyed a strangely tangible impression that a unit of time had now come to an end.
“Somebody once told me that the flow of this place has been obstructed. Does that ring a bell?”
“The flow has been obstructed?”
“I don’t know what it means, either,” I said. “It’s just what they told me.”
My uncle thought it over for a while. “No, nothing comes to mind. But it might have been a bad idea to fence off both ends of the alley. A road without an entrance or exit is a strange thing, when you stop to think about it. The fundamental principle of things like roads and rivers is for them to flow. Block them and they stagnate.”
Looking directly at me, Creta Kano said, “Whether or not you go with me to Crete, Mr. Okada, entirely separately from that, I want you to take me one time-just one time-as a prostitute. I want you to buy my flesh. Here. Tonight. It will be my last time. I will cease to be a prostitute, whether of the flesh or of the mind. I will abandon the name of Creta Kano as well. In order to do that, however, I want to have a clearly visible point of demarcation, something that says, ‘It ends here.’ “
I nodded. “I have been thinking about that,” I said. “But things are so complicated and tangled together. I can’t seem to separate them out and do one thing at a time. I don’t know how to untangle things.”
Trying to calm myself, I sat at the kitchen table, taking straight sips of the whiskey my uncle had left with me and listening to quiet music on the cassette player. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted someone to talk to me. I set the telephone on the table and stared at it for hours. Call me, somebody, please, anybody-even the mysterious phone woman; I didn’t care. It could be the most filthy and meaningless talk, the most disgusting and sinister conversation. That didn’t matter. I just wanted someone to talk to me.
But the telephone never rang. I finished the remaining half-bottle of scotch, and after the sky grew light, I crawled into bed and went to sleep. Please don’t let me dream, please just let my sleep be a blank space, if only for today.
I could not-and should not-run away, not to Crete, not to anyplace. I had to get Kumiko back. With my own hands, I had to pull her back into this world. Because if I didn’t, that would be the end of me. This person, this self that I thought of as “me,” would be lost.
I wonder if it was not Mr. Honda’s intention all along to bring the two of us together. Perhaps he believed that it would be good for me to meet you and for you to meet me. The division of keepsakes may well have been an excuse to have me visit you. This may explain the empty box. My visit to you itself would have been his keepsake.
He had no intention of leaning to converse in either language, of course; he wanted only to be able to read books.
Ushikawa laughed. “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Okada. Money does not come with names attached. Very well said! I’ll have to write that down.
“Sorry, Mr. Okada, I don’t know about things like that. As I mentioned to you at first, I’m just a stupid carrier pigeon. My master tells me what to do, and I do it. And most of the jobs he gives me are unpleasant. When I used to read the story of Aladdin, I’d always sympathize with the genie, the way they worked him so hard, but I never dreamed I’d grow up to be like him. It’s a sad story, let me tell you. But finally, everything I have said to you is a message I was sent to deliver. It comes from Dr. Wataya. The choice is up to you. So what do you say? What kind of answer should I carry back?”
Fate itself was the doctor’s own fatal disease. From his youngest days, he had had a weirdly lucid awareness that “I, as an individual, am living under the control of some outside force.” This may have been owing to the vivid blue mark on his right cheek. While still a child, he hated this mark, this imprint that only he, and no one else, had to bear upon his flesh. He wanted to die whenever the other children taunted him or strangers stared at him. If only he could have cut away that part of his body with a knife! But as he matured, he gradually came to a quiet acceptance of the mark on his face that would never go away. And this may have been a factor that helped form his attitude of resignation in all matters having to do with fate.
Most of the time, the power of fate played on like a quiet and monotonous ground bass, coloring only the edges of his life. Rarely was he reminded of its existence. But every once in a while, when the balance would shift (and what controlled the balance he never knew: he could discover no regularity in those shifts), the force would increase, plunging him into a state of near-paralytic resignation. At such times, he had no choice but to abandon everything and give himself up to the flow. He knew from experience that nothing he could do or think would ever change the situation. Fate would demand its portion, and until it received that portion, it would never go away. He believed this with his whole heart.
Not that he was a passive creature; indeed, he was more decisive than most, and he always saw his decisions through. In his profession, he was outstanding: a veterinarian of exceptional skill, a tireless educator. He may have lacked a certain creative spark, but in school he always had superior grades and was chosen to be the leader of the class. In the workplace, too, others acknowledged his superiority, and his juniors always looked up to him. He was certainly no “fatalist,” as most people use the word. And yet never once in his life had he experienced the unshakable certainty that he and he alone had arrived at a decision. He always had the sense that fate had forced him to decide things to suit its own convenience. On occasion, after the momentary satisfaction of having decided something of his own free will, he would see that things had been decided beforehand by an external power cleverly camouflaged as free will, mere bait thrown in his path to lure him into behaving as he was meant to. The only things that he had decided for himself with complete independence were the kind of trivial matters which, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to require no decision making at all. He felt like a titular head of state who did nothing more than impress the royal seal on documents at the behest of a regent who wielded all true power in the realm-like the emperor of this puppet empire of Manchukuo.
The doctor loved his wife and child. They were the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him in his life-especially his daughter, for whom his love bordered on obsession. For them, he would have gladly given up his life. Indeed, he had often imagined doing so, and the deaths he had endured for them in his mind seemed the sweetest deaths imaginable.
I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here. And that is not to imagine anything. A Russian who uses his imagination is done for. I certainly never use mine. My job is to make others use their imaginations. That’s my bread and butter. Make sure you keep that in mind. As long as you are in here, at least, picture my face if you ever start to imagine something, and say to yourself, ‘No, don’t do that. Imagining things can be fatal.’ These are my golden words of advice to you. Leave the imagining to someone else.”