My sister’s looking off to the side so half her face is in shadow and her smile is neatly cut in half. It’s like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that’s half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness.
The room was utterly silent. Now there is the silence you encounter on entering a grand manor. And there is the silence that comes of too few people in too big a space. But this was a different quality of silence altogether. A ponderous, oppressive silence. A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient. A silence pregnant with the presentiment of death. The air faintly musty and ominous.
What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.
No, I’m not used to things; I just recognize them for what they are. There’s a decisive difference between those two propositions.
Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where – at a special time and place – imagination had been set free.
As long as I’m alive, I can think what I want, when I want, any way I want, as much as I want, and nobody can tell me any different.
But she didn’t come. Maybe she was too busy to find the time to see me, I mused. But three months was far too long a gap. Even if she couldn’t come to see me, she could at least pick up the phone and call. She’d forgotten all about me, I decided. I wasn’t important to her, after all. That hurt, as if a small hole had opened up in my heart. She never should have said that she might come again. Promises – even vague ones like that – linger in your mind.
I still don’t know what sort of world this is, she thought, But whatever world we’re in now, I’m sure this is where I will stay. Where we will stay. This world must have its own threats, its own dangers, must be filled with its own type of riddles and contradictions. We may have to travel down many dark paths, leading who knows where. But that’s okay. It’s not a problem. I’ll just have to accept it. I’m not going anywhere. Come what may, this is where we’ll remain, in this world with one moon.
You have to overcome the fear and anger inside you,” the boy named Crow says. “Let a bright light shine in and melt the coldness in your heart. That’s what being tough is all about.
He lived in his own special hell.
I’m not the smartest girl in the world. If anything, I’m sort of on the stupid side, and old-fashioned. I couldn’t care less about ‘systems’ and ‘responsibility’. All I want is to get married and have a man I love hold me in his arms every night and make babies. That’s plenty for me. It’s all I want out of life.
But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.
When you’re always scheming about ways to make money, it’s like a part of you is lost.
I loved her smile. It soothed me, encouraged me. It’ll be all right, her smile told me. Just hang in there, and everything will turn out okay.
I try not to mince words. It seems to me a lot of trouble in this world has its origins in vague speech. Most people, when they go around not speaking clearly, somewhere in their unconscious they’re asking for trouble.
What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.
Tsukuru nodded. “Life’s moving along smoothly, then.” “I don’t know about smoothly, but it’s moving along, at least. ‘There’s no going back now’ might be another way of putting it.
If I relaxed my body now, I’d fall apart. I’ve always lived like this, and it’s the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I’d never find my way back.
That’s not hard work. It’s just manual labour,” Nagasawa said with finality. “The “hard work’ I’m talking about is more self-directed and purposeful.
Mr. Kino, you’re not the type who would willingly do something wrong. I know that very well. But there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing. Some people use that blank space as a kind of loophole.