This month, November 2016, Haruki Murakami received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award. He refers to Andersen’s tale “The Shadow” (you can read the story here ), which is woven around the Faustian theme of losing, or selling the shadow, then being overtaken by it (see below an excerpt from Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path ). Murakami warned against excluding outsiders and rewriting history. “No matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and hurting ourselves,” Murakami said. Both individuals and societies need to face their shadow; “we have to, when necessary, face our own shadows, confront them, and sometimes even work with them,” he said in his acceptance speech. And he is of course right, because if we don’t face the shadow, however difficult and aggravating that may be, the shadow has a Golem-like t