![]() ![]() He learns how secrets withheld generate blatant lies - the unknown woman who phoned him at midnight or Kumiko's passionate sex with her numerous lovers - to build steadily into a shimmering veil of deception, a patina of unreality between husband and wife that cannot be trusted as the true face of their relationship. Following Lieutenant Mamiya's (admittedly enforced) example, Toru begins meditating at the bottom of a dry well near his home. ![]() This is a hard lesson for the spiritually challenged and Murakami's bizarre allegories teach it well. ![]() "Everything was intertwined, with the complexity of a three-dimensional puzzle - a puzzle in which truth was not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth." Toru alone is "supernormal", trusting in appearances and face values until, as the comfortingly familiar is stripped from him - the wind-up bird that routinely creaks like an alarm clock outside the window each morning suddenly stops, Kumiko's cat disappears, Kumiko herself disappears - he drifts into a helplessly bewildered stasis. All these characters possess some psychic quality or have suffered some touchstone experience that taps into a parallel supernatural world. ![]()
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