Author: Haruki Murakami
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Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
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She drinks because she has a cup of coffee in front of her: that is her role as a customer.
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The music playing at low volume is “Go Away Little Girl” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra. No one is listening, of course.
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Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go;
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people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward.
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if you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price.”
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“Alphaville is the title of one of my favorite movies. Jean-Luc Godard.”
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“But maybe sometimes you don’t really have it together,”
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“It’s true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,” the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. “You can’t fight it.”
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Once again the single most important thing for him is how to get consistently from point A to point B over the shortest possible distance.
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The silence is so deep it hurts our ears.
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“Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you’re an orphan till the day you die.
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Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium. Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure.
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People who have finally finished the work they must do all night, young people who are tired from playing all night: whatever the differences in their situations, both types are equally reticent. Even the young couple who stop at a drink vending machine, tightly pressed against each other, have no more words for each other. Instead, what they soundlessly share is the lingering warmth of their bodies.
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The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.
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“It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s a shadowy middle ground.
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Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.
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The room is still dominated by silence, but its depth and weight have clearly diminished and retreated.
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Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part.