Quotes by Ryū Murakami

Who knew there were still people like that in this world, though? Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody elses story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity. It must have made you very sad when your own father raped you - can you describe some of your feelings at the time? Yes, I wept and wept, wonder why something like this had to happen to me. Its like that. Everyones running around comparing wounds, like bodybuilders showing off their muscles. And whats really unbelievable is that they really believe they can heal the wounds like that, just by putting them on display.

Yeah, hed said, maybe its just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it dont hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, its not just because my bellys all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like Im myself again.

But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you cant help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isnt a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow theyd get the urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby theyd get an urge to kill it?

Within two or three years of World War IIs end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depend on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what the Japanese wanted wasnt a better life, but more things.

To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. ‘A rich emotional life,’ she’d written, ‘is a privilege reserved only for the daring few’.

There were little girls who would snuggle up to any grown man and try to guide his hand inside their underwear, and there were kids who compulsively bit their own arms. Kids who would suddenly start twitching and banging their heads against a wall, not even stopping when the blood ran down their faces. Kids who waddled around oblivious to the stinking load in their own pants. Watching children like this, it was all too easy to see why their parents beat them. It was only natural to hate such kids, to ignore them and shower only your other children with love. Who wouldnt? But of course that wasnt the way it really worked. Such behaviors werent the reasons parents abused children, but the results of abuse. Children are powerless. No matter how viciously theyre beaten, children were powerless to do anything about it. Even if Mother hit them with a shoehorn or the hose of a vacuum cleaner or the handle of a kitchen knife, or strangled them or poured boiling water on them, they couldnt escape her; they couldnt even truly despise her. Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, theyd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteria could set their hearts at ease. Kindness, gentleness - anything along those lines just caused tension, since there was no telling when it would turn to overt hostility.

It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.

If everyone could feel as I felt at that moment, dressed in my preppy sweater and McGregor coat and about to set out on a little journey with my Bambi-eyed girlfriend on Christmas Eve, all conflicts in the world would vanish. Mellow smiles would rule the earth.

Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men —even children. You turn into an Oba-san the instant you lose the will to evolve.

Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know youll get through if you just hang in there.

These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that theyd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault, however. The blame lay with a certain ubiquitous spirit of the times, transmitted to them by their respective mothers. And perhaps it goes without saying that this spirit of the times was in fact an oppressive value system based primarily upon the absolute certainty that nothing in this world was ever going to change.

When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. Thats when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. Id felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp bench, Id told myself, Hey, take a good look, isnt the world still under your feet? Im on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.

That was with me for years--feeling I wasnt myself. And I do think I wasnt my real self then. Of course, Im not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all youll find is blood and muscle and bone.

Who hasnt wanted to die at one time or another?

You dont know what cold is until youve experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body.

When youre in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy whos decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.

But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything youve worked towards, the life youve carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but youre left with a wound you cant heal on your own and cant believe youll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.