Last night, I trudged home with a headache that has taken form in my head like a storm that slowly materialized from out of nowhere. I tucked myself in bed relatively early, reading a book while waiting for sleep to come. The book, “The Elephant Vanishes”, is a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer.
I had started to read the book in the office the day before. The writer has the curious ability to turn an ordinary event into something interesting. Indeed, the book was difficult to put down. When I finished reading the first short story, I remembered getting caught by a teacher reading a novel while pretending to follow our discussion by silently “reading” our textbook. I didn’t want a similar thing to happen now that I’m *cough, cough* a “professional” so I decided to bring the book home. Otherwise, I would be tempted to read the book in the office for the whole day. Hehehe.
As I read the other stories in the book, I realized that those stories have at least two things in common: they were written in the first person, the “first person” is usually an adult, and the setting is usually an ordinary place in life. Of course, I’ve read many stories written in the first person and whose main characters are adults
What bothered me was the slow pacing of the story and the ordinary setting (a house inhabited by a couple, an apartment shared by yuppie siblings). The stories were not of the fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of the corporate West. Neither were they the fictional town divided from the fantastical world by a wall. The stories seem closer to home. They made me think that these could be the stories of people I know (my parents when they were just starting out, my friend who shared an apartment with a relative) or… it could be my story. I found myself thinking, “Will my life be this boring when I reach the age of 30? A life whose only spark of interest is a call from a stranger or the mysterious disappearance of a cat (I would be lucky if I get to own a cat)? Still an unwilling slave of routine? Resigned to the bidding of fate?” The thought made me cringe. But I knew it was a possibility. I slept with that thought in mind. The good news is I have a choice. The question is what I will do with that choice.