Reality and unreality

Reality and unreality are not separate territories with a dependable border between them. They meet in the ordinary world—in a locked room, a dark tunnel, a reflection that should not exist—and make familiar explanations feel suddenly inadequate. The stories do not resolve every disturbance into a single account; instead, they show how an event can remain materially definite and emotionally impossible to absorb at the same time.

The Shock of the Real

The narrator calls his late twenties the Year of Funerals: friends and former friends, most only twenty-seven to twenty-nine, die one after another. The deaths arrive just as adulthood seems to promise an ordinary road ahead, with haircuts, shaving, insurance, hotel bars, and tax deductions. Against that reassuring routine, the narrator imagines a surprise massacre: one moment people are changing clothes, and the next their clothes no longer fit, their sleeves turned inside out and their legs in mismatched trousers. The image makes death feel at once like an attack from outside and a disorienting rupture in the survivors’ own sense of order.

Yet the comparison does not make death unreal. The narrator insists that a rabbit remains a rabbit whether it springs from a hat or from a wheat field, just as an oven remains hot and chimney smoke remains black. The bluntness of these examples counters the elaborate metaphor of attack: death may shatter the mind’s arrangement of events, but it does not thereby become less real. The tension is central to the concept. The world can be incomprehensible without ceasing to be the world.

Darkness and the Fragility of Time

In another scene, miners trapped underground extinguish their lamps to conserve air. Darkness closes around them; water drips from the ceiling every five seconds, and the men huddle together, trying to hear pickaxes—the sound that might mean rescuers are approaching, and therefore that life continues beyond their enclosure. The measurable interval of the dripping water offers a small foothold in the present, while the miners’ attention fixes on a sound they have not yet heard.

They wait for hours, and the dark begins to dissolve their sense of when and where they are. The scene feels as if it took place long ago in a distant world—or perhaps in the future, somewhere equally far away. Above ground, people are digging toward them, an effort that seems less like immediate reality than a scene in a movie. The rescue attempt is concrete, but the trapped men experience it through a darkness in which time and distance lose their ordinary shape. Uncertainty does not mean that nothing is happening; it means that the people most at risk cannot securely place what is happening within a recognizable present.

The Self as an Uncanny Double

The mirror episode brings the boundary inside the self. A night watchman in a school sees what appears to be a newly installed full-length mirror and recognizes his own reflection. After lighting a cigarette, however, he notices that the figure is recognizably him but also “another me that never should have been.” The double seems to loathe him with a hatred like an iceberg in a dark sea. When the reflected figure touches its chin and moves its fingertips up its face, the watchman realizes that he is copying the gesture, as though the figure were attempting to take control.

The fear becomes physical. His cigarette falls; the cigarette in the reflection falls too. He feels unable to move, then breaks free and strikes the mirror with his wooden kendo sword before running back to his room and locking the door. In the morning, after the typhoon has passed, he finds the cigarette butt and the sword but no mirror. The story supplies its destabilizing answer plainly: there never was a mirror. What he saw was not a ghost but himself. The incident therefore offers no safe opposition between a supernatural intruder and a rational observer; the terrifying presence belongs to the watchman’s own self, though the experience cannot be reduced to an ordinary reflection.

The encounter persists beyond the night that produced it. The watchman says he cannot forget his terror, and afterward he keeps no mirrors in his house; learning to shave without one is difficult. The absent object has consequences in the everyday world. Its absence does not undo the experience but becomes part of the way he lives, suggesting that an event may leave a durable trace even when its apparent physical cause cannot be found.

What Remains Beyond Reach

A separate night scene turns the same instability into an image of failed contact. While cutting coconuts, tropical leaves, a bar menu, and driftwood with a knife, the narrator imagines the pale, bloated body of a woman who had been an ex-United Airlines stewardess, together with rafts, sea, sky, helicopters, and pilots, suspended in a formless mist. He tries to cut through these images, but the perspective is wrong and they remain beyond the blade’s reach. The narrator cannot decide whether everything in the mist is an illusion or whether he is the illusion. The question is left open, and the knife’s concrete edge cannot settle it.

The image of the knife returns in the dream described by a young man in a wheelchair. He dreams of a sharp knife embedded in the soft part of his head where memories lie. He watches as though the injury were happening to someone else, wants someone to pull the knife out, and considers doing it himself, but cannot reach inside his head. He can stab himself, yet cannot reach the knife to remove it. As everything begins to disappear and he too starts to fade, the knife remains to the end, like a prehistoric bone on a beach. The dream gives the boundary between bodily fact and mental experience a precise, troubling form: the instrument is present, but agency and access fail.

Together, these scenes do not offer a formula for sorting reality from unreality. A death can be horrifying and still undeniable; a mirror can vanish while its terror remains; a trapped person can lose a sense of time while rescue efforts continue outside; and a dream can hold an image that feels more enduring than the dreamer. The concept’s force lies in this unresolved pressure. Ordinary objects, intervals, and actions remain in view, but none can guarantee that experience will fit neatly into what can be verified.