Everything is simple in hindsight.
In the 1980s, everything was simple.
"You know, everything is simple when it's clearly explained," she contends.
As the great Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz said, "In war everything is simple, but even the simplest thing is difficult".
"It is a big job," he said, "but everything is simple if you have the right tools".
Everything is simple, spare and modern with one exception: at the entrance is a small mustard-yellow ladder-back chair with a multicolored woven straw seat inspired by van Gogh's paintings of his bedroom in Arles.
When Rusty tells himself that "everything is simple on the water," and that "it's not like the woods where things are tangled and twisted," he is indeed out to sea.
We'd grown up in a sleepy little college town called Bellingham, an hour and a half north of Seattle: everything was simple, living is cheap, you don't have to worry about tomorrow.
That story is set in the period of Murakami's own coming-of-age, the 60's, when, he writes, "everything was simple and direct" — unlike the present time, when "if you try to grasp the reality of anything, there's always a whole slew of convoluted extras that come with it".
