Making Heads and Tails of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I'm about 40 pages into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, or ねじまき鳥クロニクル and I've already run into one of Murakami's trademark insights into life that he throws into the text without a hint of pretension.

"Contents of the conversation aside, I loved watching her at the dinner table as she talked with enthusiasm about her work. This, I told myself, was "home." We were doing a proper job of carrying out the responsibilities that we had been assigned to perform at home. She was talking about her work, and I, after having prepared dinner, was listening to her talk. This was very different from the image of home that I had imagined vaguely for myself before marriage. But this was the home I had chosen. I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with is as an established fact. Now, however, I loved in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me."

Sharing over.