The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami

[EXCERPTS]
"You can't I guess. There's nothing you can do. There's no way to prevent baldness. Guys who are going to go bald go bald. When there time comes, that's it: They just go bald. There's nothing you can do to stop it. They tell you you can keep from going bald with proper hair care, but that's bullshit. Look at the bums who sleep in Shinjuku Station. They've all got great heads of hair. You think they're washing it every day with Clinique or Vidal Sassoon or rubbing Lotion X into it? That's what the cosmetics makers will tell you, to get your money."

"I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away...as if you've taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption."

"When you sneak into somebody's backyard, it does seem that guts and curiousity are working together. Curiousity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiousity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiousity's like a fun friend you can't really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own - with whatever guts you can muster."

"If people lived forever - if they never got older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less - philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. I mean...this is what I think, but...people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they're going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they should bother, they'd probably just figure, 'Oh, well, I've plenty of time for that. I'll think about it later.' But we can't wait till later. We've got to think about it right this second...Nobody knows what's going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That's what i think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things."