"But knowing what I don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don't have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That's my problem now. I can't find the image...I rinsed my mouth and went on looking at my face for a time. I can't find the image, I said to myself. I'm thirty, I'm standing still, and I can't find the image." Toru Okada, 122, 126

"I haven't done anything since I retired...For that reason, I do not happen to carry a name card, although I realize it is terribly rude of me." Lieutenant Mamiya, 130

"All I am doing now is fulfilling my obligation to go on living." Lieutenant Mamiya, 171

"The very roots of life- those things that I can say once truly belonged to me alone- were frozen stiff or burned away out there...But what I want to convey to you, Mr. Okada, is this: I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment- perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been." Lieutenant Mamiya, 208-9

"What was getting to me was the awareness that I was no longer innocent. This was not a moralistic sense of wrongdoing, or the workings of a guilty conscience. I knew that I had made a terrible mistake, but I was not punishing myself for it. It was a physical fact that I would have to confront coolly and logically, beyond any question of punishment." Toru Okada, 234

"All I could produce was a meaningless, ugly sound like the rubbing together of two meaningless, ugly things." Toru Okada, 256

"'In that new world of ours, we were trying to get hold of new selves that were better suited to who we were deep down. We believed we could live in a way that was more perfectly suited to who we were.'...'You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else.'...This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me. Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. How come you don't get it?" Toru Okada and May Kasahara, 261-2

"This may or may not be of some comfort to you." Kumiko Okada, 273

"In fact, I have never thought to myself, "I want to do this."...I was still not myself. All I had managed to do was get a grasp on the minimum necessary container for a self- a mere container." Creta Kano, 310

"After a few hours, I knew less and less who I was. Sitting still down there in the darkness, I could tell that something inside me- inside my body- was getting bigger and bigger. It felt like this thing inside me was growing, like the roots of a tree in a pot, and when it got big enough it would break me apart...I wanted you to hear the sound of the thing chewing you up....Everybody's born with something different at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one, too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it...So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things...I just wanted to get close to that gooshy thing if I could. I wanted to trick it into coming out of me and then crush it to buts. You've got to really push the limits if you're going to trick it into coming out. It's the only way. You've got to offer it good bait...No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved either." May Kasahara, 321-3

"The waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me- a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something." Toru Okada, 326

"And they think- if they think at all- that these things are too obvious to think about, just as I used to do (or not do). They are the vaguely defined "people," and I used to be a nameless one among them. Accepting and accepted, they live with one another beneath that light, and whether it lasts forever or for a moment, there must be a kind of closeness while they are enveloped in the light. I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never be able to find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light, that I may never again be able to hold the cat's soft body in my arms. And then I feel a dull ache in the chest, as if something inside there is being squeezed to death." Toru Okada, 392

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle