Reverse the Curse

My copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has officially gone M.I.A. I am very angry about this. You see, this is the third copy of this book that I have owned, and I'm starting to fear that I shall never get past page 200.

The first copy was a present to my mother from Hunter when he came to visit the summer after senior year of high school. Being as the book was now my mother's, and as I was also engrossed in another one of Murakami's fine scribblings, I did not immediately pounce. My mother took it to Thailand with her, and proceeded to ignore it as it stealthily inflated with humidity and sand between the pages. At the end, however, instead of imitating her copy of War and Peace, which responded to this treatment by stealthily expanding and curling outwards until it resembled a nothing so much as small wood-pulp-based beachball, it just decided to give up the fight and abruptly lose its first two hundred pages, leaving the cover flopping impotently over the unexpected gap.

I actually tried reading it after the loss, reasoning that the first third of a book couldn't be that essential, but it was a lost cause from the start.

BOOK TWO: Having just finished Dance Dance Dance, I stumbled across a copy of Wind-Up Bird in a second hand bookstore and made off with it. (In an honest manner, of course. I duly paid my 5 dollars.)

This one didn't even make it home.

I was juggling a million things, and sat in a cafe to straighten myself out. I got up to get a coffee, and when I sat back down, my bag was gone.

The annoying thing there was that the only thing of any import in the whole bag was the book, and the thief probably threw it away right after seeing what was in there. A book, half a sandwich, a couple pens, some receipts, and a few pennies. Not even any actual money. Lovely.

Book the Third

Simple story here. Bought it. Started edging past page 200. Promptly lost it.

AUGH!