'a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes'

I was overcome with a sense of my own defilement. Though I returned to Tokyo I did nothing for days but shut myself up in my room. My memory remained fixed on the dead rather than the living. The rooms I had set aside in there for Naoko were shuttered, the furniture draped in white, the windowsills dusty. I spent the better part of each day in those rooms. And I thought about Kizuki. . . . Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another part of me into that world. Sometimes I feel like the caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.

—Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987; trans. J. Rubin 2000)