Somehow these paragraphs from Haruki Murakami seem to jump out at me; here, sex is not depicted as vulgar or excessively erotic - rather, there’s almost a form of abstractness; abstractness about sex hidden deep in the recesses of the mind. Because most of the time, man is so fixated on eroticism as something explicit, and not something implicit.

“After she finished crying, usually, the two of them would make love. Only after crying would she be the one to initiate it. Otherwise, he had to be the one. Sometimes she would refuse him. Without a word, she would shake her head. Then her eyes would look like White moons floating at the edge of a dawn sky - flat, suggestive moons that shimmered at the single cry of a bird at dawn. Whenever he saw her eyes looking like that, he knew there was nothing more he could say to her. Rejected, he felt neither anger nor displeasure. ‘That’s how it goes,’ he thought, nothing more. Sometimes it even made him feel relieved deep inside. They would sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, chatting peaceably. They spoke in fragments most of the time. Neither was a great talker, and they had little in common to talk about. He could never remember what it was that they were saying, just that it had been in short snatches. And all the while, one commuter train after another would go past the window.

Their lovemaking was always hushed and tranquil. It had nothing that could properly be called the joys of the flesh. Of course it would be wrong to say that they knew nothing of the pleasure that obtains when a man and a woman join their bodies. But mixed with this were far too many other thoughts and elements and styles. It was different from any sex he had experienced before. It made him think of a small room - a nice, neat room that was a comfortable place to be. It had strings of many colours hanging from the ceiling, strings of different shapes and lengths, and each string, in its own way, sent a thrill of enticement through him. He wanted to pull one, and the strings to be pulled by him. But he didn’t know which one to pull. He felt that he might pull a string and have a magnificent spectacle open up before his eyes, but that, just as easily, everything could be ruined in an instant. And so he hesitated, and while he lingered in confusion another day would end.

The strangeness of this situation was almost too much for him. He believed that he had lived his life with his own sense of values. But when he was in this room, he couldn’t help but feel that he was wandering through chaos. ‘Am I in love with her?’ But he could never reach an answer with complete conviction. All he could understand were the coloured strings hanging from the little room’s ceiling.

They were right there.” (Aeroplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry)