She would become unstable-even depressed-for some days before they began. It corresponded perfectly with the waxing and waning of the moon. What induced me to see things this way was the absolute precision of my wife's twenty-nine-day menstrual cycle.

Like it or not, this would continue for eternity (or what could be called eternity in comparison with my lifetime). I lived on the earth, the earth revolved around the sun, and around the earth revolved the moon. Only after I became a married man had it truly dawned on me that I was an inhabitant of earth, the third planet of our solar system. It's sooo tiny, like a tiny ball bearing, and really hard. I want to cut open the skin and take out the squishy stuff, use a scalpel and some kind of spatula to get through it, and the closer you get to the center, the harder the squishy stuff gets, until you reach this tiny core. It's squishy on the outside, and the deeper you go inside, the harder it gets. That's it, don't you think? No, don't answer. Maybe it's all hard, like toothpaste dried up inside the tube. I want to take it out of a dead person and cut it open and look inside. Something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves. I'm sure there must be something like that. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighbourhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world. We didn't know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn't bother the wind-up bird. There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. As if nine minutes would be too short or eleven minutes too long. What were we supposed to understand about each other in ten minutes? What can two people understand about each other in ten minutes? Come to think of it, she seemed awfully sure about those ten minutes: it was the first thing out of her mouth. Here are quotes from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, as I've picked out from my recent re-read.

The wind up bird chronicle pages