Sun 5 Mar 2006
So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
- Haruki Murakami, “Sputnik Sweetheart”.
If you still have not discovered Haruki Murakami, I recommend you do so. His writing is refreshing, strange, empathetic, and yet so very easy to read. So many times I dream of reading “Norwegian Wood” again for the first time. It has finally been translated into Spanish under the title “Tokio Blues”. Don’t ask me why the publishers do not feel that Spanish people are sufficiently intelligent to buy a book named after a Beatles’ song that isn’t very well known. “I once had a girl or should I say she once had me . . . isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood”.
I would also recommend the more dense Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart or Dance, Dance, Dance.
October 10th, 2006 at 9:38 am
[…] I am just about to go to bed and finish off the long day by reading Haruki Murakami’s short story, “The Year of Spaghetti” from his new book of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. As you may know from two previous posts (Noruwei no Mori and Haruki Murakami), I am very much a fan of the Japanese novelist. In any event, this story is about a guy who spends an entire year cooking pasta for himself everyday, seven days a week, and always eats the pasta by himself. As a matter of fact, he believes that pasta should be eaten by oneself in solitude. When I read the following lines, a huge smile formed stretched across my face (emphasis added in bold): “Every time I sat down to a plate of spaghetti –especially on a rainy afternoon — I had the distant feeling that somebody was about to knock on my door. The person I imagined about to visit me was each time different. Sometimes stranger, sometimes someone I knew. Once it was a girl with slim legs whom I had dated at school, and once it was myself from a few years back, come to pay a visit. And one time it was none other than William Holden, with Jennifer Jones on his arm . . . Not one of these people, though, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like fragments of memory, and then slipped away.” […]