“Be careful of water,” Mr. Honda had said to me. I had never paid any heed to his prophecy. True, I had never forgotten it, either (you don’t forget anything as weird as that), but I had never taken it seriously. Mr. Honda had been nothing more than a harmless episode for Kumiko and me. I would repeat his words as a joke now and then when something came up: “Be careful of water.” And we would laugh. We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.”
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, page 588
