"By the way where are we?"I ask
"I have no idea," she says. She cranes her neck and sweeps the place with her eyes. Her earrings jiggle back and forth like two precarious pieces of ripe fruit ready to fall. "From the time I'm guessing we're near Kurashike, not that it matters. A rest area on a highway is just a place you pass through. To get from her to there." She holds up her right index finger and her left index finger, about twelve inches apart.
"What does it matter what it's called?" she continues. "You've got your restrooms and your food. Your fluorescent lights and your plastic chairs. Crappy coffee. Strawberry-jam sandwiches. It;s all pointless-- assuming you try to find a point to it. We're coming from somewhere, heading somewhere else. That's all you need to know, right?"
I nod. And nod. And nod.
The whole theme of this story is unveiling its self to me more and more as I read. Kafka is trying to change who he is, or he is trying to change his fate. He has been working all through junior high for the day that he can leave his home and start his "new life", as he calls it. He has been building up muscle, becoming as strong as he can, and he has made his mind like a sponge absorbing all the knowledge he could throughout junior high. This passage is very interesting because it is almost a metaphor to life, assuming that you believe in fate. She tells Kafka that it does not matter where they are because they will still end up in Takamatsu. In other words, it does not matter what you do in the middle you will still go from point A to point B. Assuming that fate is real, in Kafka's case this means that all hispreparations and hopes for a "new life" are meaningless because no matter what he will ultimately meet his fate, and he cannot change who he is. This is Ironic in away because she tells Kafka this and he nods, agreeing.
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