I

“I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of a being was this self of mine? 

How did it function? What did it feel—and how? 

I had to grasp each of these things through experience, to memorize and stockpile them. 

Do you see what I am saying? Virtually everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. 

At the same time that I was entirely new, I was almost entirely empty. 

I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands. 

I had to make this thing I called ‘I’—or, rather, make the things that constituted me.”

 - Haruki Murakami, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle