Book//mark – In the Miso Soup | Ryū Murakami, 1997
Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup, 1997
“When you’re a kid, getting lost isn’t just an event or a situation, it’s like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you’ve done something that can never be undone.”
“Parents, teachers, government – they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”
”I had just turned twenty, and though my English is far from perfect I was working as a ‘nightlife guide’ for foreign tourists. Basically I specialize in what you might call sex tours, so it’s not as if my English needs to flawless.”
“I’d never seen a face quite like this one. It took me a while to pinpoint exactly what was so odd about it. The skin. It looked almost artificial, as if he’d been horribly burned and the doctors had resurfaced his face with this fairly realistic man-made material.”
“Killing people has always been absolutely essential for me to go on living.”
“I’m a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I’m definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.”
“Now what is it you want tonight, basically?”
“Sex.”
“What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.”
“That was with me for years–feeling I wasn’t myself. And I do think I wasn’t my real self then. Of course, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it–slice yourself open and all you’ll find is blood and muscle and bone.”
“The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there.”
“All Americans have something lonely about them. I don’t know what the reason might be, except maybe that they’re all descended from immigrants.”
“People who love horror films are people with boring lives… when a really scary movie is over, you’re reassured to see that you’re still alive and the world still exists as it did before.”
“Sinteen-years -old girls are probably the most sensitive and perceptive group of people in this entire country.”
“I wondered if there were planets where it’s okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes.”
“The ghosts of sad, cheap souls live on in sad, cheap furniture.”
“He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children’s building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.”
“I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.”
“Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she’d become a super-exclusive person.”
“What’s good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of open-hearted innocence. And what’s not so good is that they can’t imagine any world outside the States, or any value system different than their own.”
“Just an hour earlier, Frank had told me he had two older sisters. These two sisters, I distinctively remembered him saying, used to imitate TV comedians. But now he came from a family of only boys who all played baseball.”
“But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can’t help smiling?”
“I’m sure we’ve all experienced really malevolent feelings once or twice in our lives, the desire to kill somebody,say.but there’s always a braking mechanism somewhere along the line that stop us.”
“And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.”
“The feeling that the world was at my feet and the feeling that I alone was cut off from the world, the sense of power and the anxiety, had both stayed with me ever since that evening at the pond.”
“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there’s no reason a child commits murder, just as there’s no reason a child gets lost. What would it be – because his parents weren’t watching him? That’s not a reason, it’s just a step in the process.”
“I once heard a psychiatrist type say on TV that people need to feel they’re of some value to go on living, and I think there’s something to that. It wouldn’t be east to keep going if you thought you were of no use to anyone.”
“My greatest pleasure is to be hurt by someone I love.”
“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like lonliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it’s been carved out with a knife; an emptiness you’re left with when something very important has been taken away from you.”
“It’s always precisely the sort of smug old wanker you would never ever want to end up like. We don’t live the way you tell us to because we’re afraid that if we do we’ll grow up to be like you, and the thought of that is unbearable. It’s alright for you because you’ll be dead soon anyway, but we’ve still got another fifty or sixty years to live in this stinking country.”
Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup, 1997
