After having finished reading Murakami's A wild sheep chase I felt like engaging in a similar type of reading, which ultimately led me to reading his thirty five page short story Sleep taken from the first published collection of short stories with fabulous illustrations by Kat Menschik, which in my opinin perfectly complemented the text.
The story skirts around the theme of wakefulness ... sleeplessness ... "living" and dying (beyond the literal sense) as from the perspective of a young house-wife, whose ambiguous chain of thoughts have her "trapped" during the night time when she does claim space and time from a monotonous daily routine to redefine herself as a woman, by being "awake" to herself whils her family, the ones she is directly related to ... "sleep".
"By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without power would be like opening one's eyes without seeing anything."
I closed my eyes and tried to recall the sensation of sleep, but all that existed for me inside was a wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness: what it called to mind was death. Was I about to die? And if I died now, what would my life have amounted to?"
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