I feel like I've swallowed a cloudy sky
It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly, said Naoko. She made a neat pile of fish bones at the edge of her plate and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief. There's no need to raise your voice her...
Where I went in my travels, it's impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in whic...
When it's raining like this, said Naoko, it feels as if we're the only ones in the world. I wish it would just keep raining so the three of us could stay together.
We couldn't bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I'm sure we would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing unhappy.Unhappy? Why's that?With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair...
As usual, Junko thought about Jack London's 'To Build a Fire.' It was the story of a man traveling alone through the snowy Alaskan interior and his attempts to light a fire. He would freeze to death u...
Writing a novel is like having a dream.
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved,...
I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.
To Tengo, sexual desire was fundamentally an extension of a means of communication. And so, to look for sexual desire in a place where there was no possibility of communication seemed inappropriate to...
Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.
once your get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you get dissapointed, and dissapointment leads to a feeling of helplessness. You get careless and let yo...
I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tri...
I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. Tha...
When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal for...
No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks...
From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alon...
Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and...
I might have been afraid that if I really loved someone and needed her, one day she might suddenly disappear without a word, and I'd be left all alone.