Excerpt from "After Dark" by Haruki Murakami.

Takahashi continues: "What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle." He stares at the space above the table and heaves a long sigh. "Anyhow, that day was a turning point for me. After that I decided to study law seriously. I figured that's where I might find whatever I was looking for. Studying the law is not as much fun as making music, but what the hell, that's life. That's what it means to grow up." [...] Mari is thinking about something. Takahashi asks her, 'Have you ever seen Love Story? It's an old movie." Mari shakes her head. "They had it on TV the other day. It's pretty good. Ryan O'Neal is the only son of an old-money family, but in college he marries a girl from a poor Italian family and gets disowned. They even stop paying his tuition. The two manage to scrape by and keep up their studies until he graduates from Harvard Law School with honours and joins a big law firm." Takahashi pauses to take a breath. Then he goes on: "The way Ryan O'Neal does it, living in poverty can be kind of elegant -- wearing a thick white sweater, throwing snowballs with Ali MacGraw, Francis Lai's sentimental music playing in the background. But something tells me I wouldn't fit the part. For me, poverty would be just plain poverty. I probably couldn't even get the snow to pile up for me like that." (Murakami 2007: 99, 101). Murakami, Haruki. After Dark. Trans. Jay Rubin. London: Harvill Secker, 2007.