> [!cite]- Metadata > 2025-08-03 10:37 > Status: #book > Tags: `Read Time:` > Haruki Murakami is a renowned Japanese author known for his imaginative novels that blend elements of magical realism, surrealism, and themes of loneliness and alienation. 3 "*When the time comes,*" Crow repeats, as if weighing these words in his hand. 5 **Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. 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 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. Sometime *Inside* of 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 up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.** 5 "You're going to be the world's toughest fifteen-year-old," Crow whispers as I try to fall asleep. Like he was carving the words in a deep blue tattoo on my heart. 5 **And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic 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.** 9 All the students dress neatly, have nice straight teeth, and are boring as hell. Naturally I have zero friends. 12 Raindrops beat against the glass, blurring streetlights alongside the road that stretch off into the distance at identical intervals like they were set down to measure the earth. 17 It was about ten minutes or so after we began hunting mushrooms that the children started to collapse. 23 "In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion." 53 "Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people." "I see. . . ." "I ran across another person like that once." --- ### **References**