BOOK - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1995)
MOVIE - Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov (1929)
INSTALLATION - JR - WOMEN ARE HEROES
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle QUOTATION
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle QUOTATION
No matter how far I went, though, there was no bottom. My descent seemed to take forever. I reminded myself of the sound of the pebble hitting bottom. The well did have a bottom! Working my way down this damned ladder was what took so much time. When I had counted twenty rungs, a wave of terror overtook me. It came suddenly, like an electric shock, and froze me in place. My muscles turned to stone. Every pore of my body gushed sweat, and my legs began to tremble. There was no way this well could be so deep. This was the middle of Tokyo. It was right behind the house I lived in. I held my breath and listened, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The pounding of my own heart reverberated in my ears with such force I couldn’t even hear the cicadas screaming up above. I took a deep breath. Here I was on the twentieth rung, unable either to proceed farther down or to climb back up. The air in the well was chilling and smelled of the earth. It was a separate world down here, one cut off from the surface, where the sun shone so un-stingingly. I looked up to the mouth of the well above me, tiny now. The well’s circular opening was cut exactly in half by the half of the wooden cover I had left in place.
“Just a little farther down, I told myself. Just a little more. Don’t worry, there is a bottom. And at the twenty-third rung, I reached it. My foot came in contact with the earth in the bottom of the well. From below, it looked like a half-moon floating in the night sky. “A half-moon will last for several days,” Malta Kano had said. She had predicted it on the telephone. Terrific. And when the thought crossed my mind, I felt some strength leave my body. My muscles relaxed, and the solid block of breath inside me released and came out. Squeezing out one last spurt of strength, I started down the ladder again.
“I wanted to shout for someone. I wanted to scream that I was shut up inside here. That I was hungry. That the air was going bad. I felt as if I had reverted to being a helpless little child. I had run away on a whim and would never be able to find my home again. I had forgotten the way. It was a dream I had had any number of times. It was the nightmare of my youth-going astray, losing the way home. I had forgotten all about those nightmares years ago. But now, in the bottom of this deep well, they came to life again with terrible vividness. Time moved backward in the dark, to be swallowed by a different kind of time.”
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