The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
From Family Affair:
- " Well, if you make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things, there's nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you can think again at that point. "
- " I'm sure you're a little confused," I said. " These changes in life are like changes in the barometric pressure. I'm kind of confused, too, in my own way."
From A Window:
- What a strange world we live in! All I want is a perfectly ordinary hamburger steak, and the only way I can have it at this particular point in time is Hawaiian-style without pineapple.
- The answer is beyond me. Even now, I have no idea. There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate. All I can do is loo up from the train at the windows of the buildings that might be hers. Every one and them could be her window, it sometimes seems to me, and at other times I think that none of them could be hers. There are simply too many of them.
From The Silence:
- "After that, I was home free. I slept soundly, ate square meals, went to the gym. I wasn't going to be defeated. It wasn't like I had triumphed over Aoki, either. It was a matter of my not losing out on lilfe. It's too easy to let yourself get ground down by those who give you shit. So I held out for five more months. No one said one word to me. I'm not wrong, I kept telling myself, everybody else is. I held my chest up every day I went to school."
The Second Bakery Attack & On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning are my favorites in this compilation of short stories. I felt really comfortable reading them. I can't explain why :)
