hi stranger

at mudie's corner in oxford street all the red and blue beads had run together on the string. the motor omnibuses were locked. mr. spalding going to the city looked at mr. charles budgeon bound for shepherd's bush. the proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other's faces. yet few took advantage of it. each had his own business to think of. each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, james spalding, or charles budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all - save 'a man with the red moustache,' 'a young man in grey smoking a pipe.'

virginia woolf

i came across an excellent book sale last week and grabbed jacob’s room by virginia woolf for five bucks. i sort of have an obsession with her, the oppression she dealt with supposedly being homosexual, having some sort of mental illness (dementia, hearing voices), but still seeing the political oppression of being a woman in the victorian age. she was brilliant in her own strange, almost avant garde, way. i’ve read mrs. dalloway three times in college, the first two times for a paper and the third time for another class. by then, i really didn’t need to read the book again, but i did as i saw it as an opportunity to indulge myself. it’s weird to think that i used to read so much.

i actually didn’t care for mrs. dalloway the first time i read it. it’s just about this woman, clarissa dalloway, whose only concern was a party she was throwing. the story takes place in only one day. but in this one day, she comes to an epiphany. another character had been a soldier who suffers from post trauma stress disorder. even though they don’t know each other in the story, they are basically two sides of the same coin. only after reading it again did i begin to grasp the beauty of the book, and even at that time, i could barely articulate why i loved it so much. what i’ve come to conclude is that even though clarissa dalloway seemed so shallow with her only concern about a party, she was a lovely person, worrying about how people would get along. also, it was the style of writing, stream of conciousness, that i fell in love with.

so we’ll see how i feel about jacob’s room. here’s the first excerpt that jumped out at me:

“who...” said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd on the platform and jacob had already gone, she did not finish her sentence. as this was cambridge, as she was staying there for the week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and round tables, this sight of her fellow-traveler was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever.

finished

the wind-up bird chronicle has been an incredible read. of the books i've read so far from murakami--the wind-up bird chronicle, norwegian wood, after the quake, and south of the border, west of the sun, his protagonists tend to be pretty inert and comfortably so. external forces seem to occur as a test to see if the protagonists would sway, which they all do, just a little. but that's the way it is in reality. people rarely change. even if they do, it's bit by bit. the change happens over a long period and with immense subtlety.

i love that toru okada remains so faithful to kumiko throughout all that time. the way that malta & creta kano and nutmeg & cinnamon appear so suddenly and then disappear so quietly works in this story. people weave in and out of our lives like that some times, and there's a certain beauty to it.

also, the concept of the antithesis of a soulmate is fascinating. people talk about finding one's soulmate all the time but never mention having to face one's...soul nemesis? the idea of a soulmate and its antithesis is really about who each of us are, at our core. and murakami touching on a dismal part of japan's history makes the idea of soulmate and soul nemesis more profound by reaching back in time. it hints at the concept as an inherent element to life. it's not solely a modern day concept or something that only happened in the past. it's just there and has always been there.

i wonder what my soulmate and soul nemesis are like. i want to be ready when i meet them or come upon them again.

kind of weird

lately, it's really been bothering me that, i don't know, the way people work like this every day from morning to night is kind of weird. hasn't it ever struck you as strange? i mean, all i do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. i don't have to think at all. it's like i just put my brain in a locker before i start work and pick it up on the way home. i spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then i eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course i have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time i have is like nothing. and because i'm so tired from work, the "free time" i have i mostly spend lying around in a fog. i don't have any time to sit and think about anything. of course, i don't have to work on weekends, but then i have to do the laundry and cleaning i've let go, and sometimes i go into town, and before i know it the weekend is over. i once made up my mind to keep a diary, but i had nothing to write, so i quit after a week. i mean, i just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.

but still--but still--it absolutely does not bother me that i'm now just a part of the work i do. i don't feel the least bit alienated from my life. if anything, i sometimes feel that by concentrating on my work like this, with all the mindless determination of an ant, i'm getting closer to the "real me." i don't know how to put it, but it's kind of like by not thinking about myself i can get closer to the core of myself. that's what i mean by "kind of weird."

--may kasahara

memories

as you know, the war ended a very long time ago, and memory naturally degenerates as the years go by. memories and thoughts age, just as people do. but certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

...i have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. i have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. but each time i tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.

even now i can recall each tiny detail with such terrible clarity, i feel i am remembering events that happened yesterday. i can hold the sand and the grass in my hands; i can even smell them. i can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky. i can feel the dry, sandy wind against my cheeks. by comparison, it is the subsequent events of my life that seem like delusions on the borderline of dream and reality.

...but what i want to convey to you, mr. okada, is this: i happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and i have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. as a person who finds himself in such a position, i have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. the light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment--perhaps only a matter of seconds. once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. one may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. in that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. all that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

--lieutenant mamiya


a powerful expression of what post-traumatic disorder must feel like, with its roots wrapped tightly around the memories of extraordinary events, so tight that life is stuck in that moment, unable to move forward.

war

he told me about the war in china. he was a soldier all the way, with only grammar school behind him, but he had his own reservations about this messy war on the continent, which looked as if it would never end, and he expressed these feelings honestly to me. "i don't mind fighting," he said. "i'm a soldier. and i don't mind dying in battle for my country, because that's my job. but this war we're fighting now, lieutenant--well, it's just not right. it's not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the finish. we advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. then the chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian populations, and we don't even know who the enemy is. so then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out 'renegades' or 'remnant troops,'...i'm telling you, lieutenant, this is one war that doesn't have any righteous cause. it's just two sides killing each other. and the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. for them, there's no nationalist party, no young marshal zhang, no eighth route army. if they can eat, they're happy. i know how these people feel: i'm the son of a poor fisherman myself. the little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive--just barely. i can't believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do japan one bit of good."
--sergeant hamano

i wouldn't be surprised if some of the american soldiers sent to iraq share the same feelings, although a different time and place. actually, i hope some of them do.