When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.
I don't know why I keep asking you these questions. It's not like I expect you to answer, and even if you did answer, how would I know? But maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe when I ask you a question l...
Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying you. た means house, and with the honorific お, it literally means your honorable house, implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed i...
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
Live. For Now. For the time being.
Jiko: Surfer, wave, same thing.That's just stupid, I said. A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. A wave is...
Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.
This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a novelist and New Woman7 of the Taisho era.8 She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty...
How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal farther?
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fictio...
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as...
You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.
You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move a...
Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in...
The way you write ronin is 浪人 with the character for wave and the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.
She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people....
In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that?Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe...
In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.