What matters not is the circumstance through which you are pulled into a piece of literature, but instead, how you spill out of its grip once it gets a firm hold of you. Kafka on the Shore wedged its way into my early 20s as conveniently as can be.
Mind unmotivated and head blindly forward like a deer in headlights, I found myself, now more than ever after all my scholastic endeavors, becoming a self-inclined page-turner. Reading often becomes mechanical work, but Haruki Murakami had me as attentive as a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier guard. He presented before me such an exquisite, yet digestible slice of life that I could not bear not to pack my plate pouring over the edges. The need for turning back for seconds skipped my mind because it is that gravitational. If clockwork hadn’t confined me to metrics, I could've very much finished this in one prolonged sitting.
In some sort of self-righteous effort to look beyond the times while taking the trolley, tucking my knees in and unfolding this novel during my hour commutes made my rides through both the downtown railings and Murakami’s magical realism all the more worthwhile.
If I prefaced any conversational exchange with
Hey, I just finished a paralleled story of this illiterate old man who talks to cats and makes fish fall from the sky while looking for a stone to open an other-worldly plane, and this young runaway boy cursed by his soul-stealing, flute-obsessed father who destines him Oedipal tragedy!
you’d find me insane, but that’s how it went.
All that, and then some.
Onto Norwegian Wood!
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