If the novel is the literary form that offers freedom to speak our mind, I’m not sure it can be written with a closed mind. Clearly, there is something at stake when we ask why the novels matters.
But is it so clear? I’m guessing that sometimes, in our own lives, we prefer obscurity because it is less painful than clarity. The novel matters because it does not have to be clear or obscure. Yet, in the voyage out between these binaries – between the oil spills, thistles and phantoms a novel might pass on the way, between desire, disappointment and the people who clean offices at dawn on page 33 – a novel can reach for understanding and re-examine meaning.
Some of the most visually captivating celestial objects are quiet, steady, even calm—and so dark that they not only emit no visible light but actually absorb it, creating a blackness so profound they seem to be a notch cut out in space.
These shadowy expanses have many sobriquets—dark nebulae, dust clouds, knots—but I prefer to call them Bok globules, a name they received in honor of Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok, who studied them.
As a taxi glides dreamily through the Shinjuku neighborhood in the opening credits, Master gives a little voice-over: “When people finish their day and hurry home, my day starts … My diner is open from midnight to seven in the morning. They call it ‘Midnight Diner.’ Do I even have customers? More than you would expect.”
A little research confirmed that the izakaya in the show is wholly fictitious, yet I wanted to believe a place with that kind of food and that kind of feeling was real. On a recent trip to Tokyo, I set out to find one just like it.