"Better than any ritual is the worship achieved through wisdom..."
Even so, my memory has grown increasingly distant, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? Be that as it may, it's all I have to work with. Clutching these fades, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones. This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko.
Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about Naoko. But I was never able to produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start - the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect though.
Replaying Murakami in my daily life. I’ve let it sit on the shelf for much too long now. Actually, I’ve let a lot of other things gather dust on the shelf; this journal being one of them. It's funny how whenever I become aware of how completely fragmented and incoherent my reality is I turn toward an author who's characters embody that same complexity. In a way, his surreal environments create a juncture at which I go from distraction to direction. And that is exactly why I decided to start this journal up again. Writing for me is the process of cleaning house, if you will. Organizing, shifting, separating the true from the false. Quite a few things have undergone some drastic changes. I carry a reminder to embrace changebut nothing really to keep track of how I got here. This will be it. This will be a way of becoming aware of the process by which I've arrived right here - being serenaded with the Black Balloon by the Goo Goo Dolls
