How clocks are increasing -Afternoon on the Islands of Langerhans-　Haruki Murakami

   Sometimes I wonder if life is nothing more than the process of increasing the number of clocks. Of course, this reflection is not necessarily something that applies to everyone in society, and it is only a personal opinion that arises from my personal aspect of life. There is no generality to it. About fifteen years ago, when I had just gotten married, there wasn't a single thing called a clock in my house. Of course, poverty was one of the reasons, but I didn't really want a clock. There was not much need for it. When morning came, the cat would wake us up, literally hitting us because it was hungry, and we would sleep when we felt sleepy.
There are electric clocks everywhere in the city, so it's not inconvenient. There were no radios, TVs, or telephones at home, and we had to go about 500 meters to the tobacco shop to buy a highlighter and peek at the grandfather clock in the back room to check the time, but I didn't really think about wanting a clock. Now, with wristwatches, table clocks, and audio timers combined, there are sixteen clocks in my house. Sixteen. Sixteen clocks are ticking away in my house. It's really a life that seems like a lie when I think about what happened fifteen years ago.

About half of the sixteen clocks are gifts from somewhere. They are prizes for winning something, rewards for short manuscripts, personal gifts, and the like. These kinds of things accumulate one after another like a kind of entropy that appears in Philip K. Dick's novels. Thanks to that, my whole house has become like a clock's nest.
Sometimes, when I feel like it, I go around adjusting the time of the sixteen clocks one by one. As I go there and move the hands forward and come back here to move them back, I think life is a strange thing. Even if I didn't have a clock, it wasn't really inconvenient.