But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?
Don’t keep looking back all the time, you’re bound to get depressed. And all right, you can’t do your job as well as you used to. But it’s the same for all of us, see? We’ve all got to put our feet up at some point... you’ve got to keep looking forward.
The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?
Abiding love that has endured the years – that we see only rarely. When we do, we’re only too glad to ferry the couple together.
One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue out of one’s limitations.
We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is.
For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions.
Perhaps God’s so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he’s wishing himself to forget.
It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did.
Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?
Wasn’t really, to tell you the truth. No shock at all.” Then he went on: “I always told her she should go, told her she should go and find love, you know, true love. She deserves it, don’t you think? That’s where she’s gone now. Off to find true love. Perhaps she’ll find it too. Out there, on the South China Sea, who knows? Perhaps she’ll meet a traveller, in a port, in a hotel, who knows? She’s become a romantic, you see? I had to let her go.” There were now tears welling in his eyes.
Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways. But there is no virtue at all in clinging as some do to tradition merely for its own sake.
But Ruth and Tommy never did anything gross in front of people, and if sometimes they cuddled or whatever, it felt like they were genuinely doing it for each other, not for an audience.
My conscience, Sensei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world.
We were right for each other once. Whether we always will be, that’s anyone’s guess.
All right, so neither of us are exactly in our first flush of youth, but you’ve got to keep looking forward.’ And I believe it was then that he said: ‘You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. That’s how I look at it. Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.
The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
But that’s a funny idea. Maybe I did know, somewhere deep down. Something the rest of you didn’t.
I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.
Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.