I was plagued by a heavy sense of loss, as if my heart had become empty.
These clownish words of deceit were taken more seriously than the truth.
I had the feeling that were Mother to die, my own flesh would melt away with her.
If all you’ve got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you’ll betray yourself.
Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.
Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it’s probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come.
But in my softness I find peace, however fleeting.
Somehow it is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance, all of what we might call the “heaviness of blood” or perhaps the “solidity of human life” – it has not even a bird’s weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather, and it is smiling.
One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add to every situation -a quality which has made people call me at times a liar- but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage;.
Extending discipline for the minority to everyone else at the same time seems particularly cruel. As I grow older, I have begun to understand more and more how ethics taught in school and public mores are two different things. Those who insist on keeping ethics in school look like fools. People think they’re eccentric. They’ll never succeed, they’ll always be penniless.
Across from me four or five salarymen who all looked about the same age were just sitting there. They must have been around 30. I didn’t like any of them. Their eyes were empty and dull. They had no vigor. But now, if I so much as grinned at them, I could very well be dragged off by one of these men, falling into the chasm of compulsory marriage. A mere smile can determine a woman’s fate. It is frightening. Fascinatingly so. I have to be careful.
I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.
Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.
I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it.
Something hard about her gives you the impression less of a beautiful woman than of a handsome young man.
It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings. So I said nothing of the truth.
It was only natural for Yozo to vacillate when asked about the reason behind his suicide – it was everything to him.
I should like to record that as I manipulated the peeling lacquer chopsticks to eat my jelly, I felt unbearably lonely.
As a child I had absolutely no notion of what others, even members of my own family, might be suffering or what they were thinking. I was aware only of my own unspeakable fears and embarrassments. Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown, a child who never spoke a single truthful word.
Just as a man has the right to live, he ought also to have the right to die.