Murakami on Water & Memories

I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s ‘After Dark’.  And I would like to share some excerpts from the book , Murakami’s take on water and memories to be more specific. The reason I liked the following excerpt on water is because it makes sense to me. I have blogged about similar sentiments in this entry as well. Water helps dilute my emotions. Read what water is, to a character in Murakami’s book.

“Wanna walk a little?” Mari says.
“Sure,let’s walk. Walking is good for you.Walk slowly; drink lots of water.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s my motto for life. ‘Walk slowly; drink lots of water.’ “

Murakami seems to know exactly what memories are.Take a read.

….. Memory is so crazy! It’s like we’ve got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.”

Korogi stands there holding the remote control.

“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed’ em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction—they’re all just fuel.”

Korogi nods to herself. Then she goes on: “You know, I think if I didn’t have that fuel, if I didn’t have these memory drawers inside me, I would’ve snapped a long time ago. I would’ve curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. It’s because I can pull the memories out of the drawers when I have to—the important ones and the useless ones—that I can go on living this nightmare of a life. I might think I can’t take it any more, that I can’t go on any more, but one way or another I get past that.”

A postcard from the dead…

Me and the post card walked together in the dark. Each one of us knowing that an infinite space separates the two of us. Both aware that it is a distance which cannot be covered. We will never meet, never talk, never walk. The ‘we’ will never exist.

And then I realize that the road ahead is dark, pitch-dark. The grasses along the sides have grown longer since I last saw them. I am a bit scared of the dark. A bit more worried about the unknown lurking behind the grasses. My thoughts go back to the postcard. I feel good that the postcard’s still there. It no longer feels distant. It feels as close as anything can be. So we walk, hand in hand: me and the silhouette of Kafka in Prague…