海边的卡夫卡 disc 1 -track02

I do as he says, get everything else out of my head. I forget who I am, even. I’m a total blank. Then things begin to surface. Things that – as we sit here on the old leather sofa in my father’s study – both of us can see.

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction,” Crow says.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous 1 dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling 2 up into the sky like pulverised bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And that’s exactly what I do. I imagine a white funnel 3 stretching vertically 4 up like a thick rope. My eyes are closed tight, hands cupped over my ears, so those fine grains of sand can’t blow inside me. The sandstorm draws steadily 5 closer. I can feel the air pressing on my skin. It really is going to swallow me up.

The boy called Crow rests a hand softly on my shoulder, and with that the storm vanishes.

“From now on – no matter what – you’ve got to be the world’s toughest 15-year-old. That’s the only way you’re going to survive. And in order to do that, you’ve got to figure what it means to be tough. You following me?”

I keep my eyes closed and don’t reply. I just want to sink off into sleep like this, his hand on my shoulder. I hear the faint flutter 6 of wings.

“You’re going to be the world’s toughest 15-year-old,” Crow whispers as I try to fall asleep. As if he were carving 7 the words in a deep blue tattoo 8 on my heart.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic 9 storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town and live in a corner of a small library. It’d take a week to go into the whole thing, all the details. So I’ll just give the main point. On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library.

It sounds a little like a fairy tale. But it’s no fairy tale, believe me. No matter what sort of spin you put on it.