what reading Murakami feels like

the story begins (stop me if you’ve heard this one) 

with a run-of-the-mill man 

with a run-of-the-mill job 

in a run-of-the-mill apartment in japan. 

living an orderly if lonely existence, 

pasta and endless beer, a book, classical records.

interspersed 

with occasional encounters with women 

with curiously placed moles on their bodies, always 

petite and slender and inwardly intense, 

a little plain on the outside.

everything is plain on the outside. 

his life is like a snapshot, a hole punctured 

in the great anatomy of time, around it hissing static. 

the man gradually becomes aware of the static, can feel its buzz 

creeping into dreams like inside-out nightmares. 

he cannot make sense of it. 

he cannot make sense of anything, just lets himself be pulled 

along like a person stunned by the smell of the earth after rain, 

shocked at waking into the absurdity of existence. 

he quits his job, or no longer comes in, and they fire him. 

he does not seem to care (I cannot stress enough how he does not seem to care. 

I cannot ever tell if this is depression or the deepest sense of peace, but 

my mind always settles on both somehow, and that seems right and 

relatable in a way that makes my soul thrum.)

despite being unemployed now, the man is somehow surviving. 

whatever boring thing he did gives him an enviable cushion 

of savings, or he has a mostly-absent partner who works 

or money is meaningless and he's slipped into the void, the feel of it delicious 

like the skin coming off a wounded limb all in one piece. 

he has almost no needs and certainly no wants but to find that sourceless 

hissing at the corners of his mind like a radio set between stations, 

the blurring at the corners of the world and his eyes, like every time 

he looks to the side, someone has just moved out of frame. 

a past lover. a deceased friend. 

god, or his benevolent absence. 

things happen to him, and he lets them, 

riding the wave of some mysterious frequency. 

days are spent alone, wandering. 

he follows a cat into a neighbor's overgrown yard, 

or a set of stairs to a series of empty offices with strange signs 

on the doors. days lose their names. the static has moved inside. 

they are not so separate now, where it ends and he begins.

occasionally, he meets a talking animal or a fold in time, and steps 

over it like a wrinkle in a carpet. or- 

his foot catches and he falls 

out into that great hissing buzz, 

the static really just a vast blackness, scattershot 

with rippling stars.