Rice pudding again?

"Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which - or, rather, all the more because - here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here."

Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance



Reading Murakami is like being at home while listening to jazz and cooking something exquisite just for you, in your small but perfect kitchen. You think you feel at ease in your world, you think it's just right the way it is, when all of the sudden a monster taps on your window. It's a monster, you know it is. It looks terribly scary but at the same time you feel sorry for it and want to discover what it wants from you. So you open the window and ask the monster what he wants. And then...a journey not unlike Alice in Wonderland starts imposing itself on you.

It's amazing.

(LB)


Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living (I suppose there are a few exceptions), they think that the world of life (or whatever) is this place where everything is (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent. ... It's like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you've got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can't tell what's going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni cheese in the darkness when nobody's looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it's natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me that's just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni cheese. ...


Haruki Murakami, The wind-up bird chronicle