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.
What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another.
Compared to these women, isn’t a woman who is not beautiful – who is even considered to be ugly – and yet enjoys that fact, a far happier person? No matter how beautiful a woman might be, she always has imperfections, and likewise no matter how ugly a woman might be, there’s always a part of her that is beautiful. And they seem to freely revel in that part of themselves, unlike beautiful women. It’s not a substitute for anything, or a metaphor.
A circle that has many centers but no circumference.
One opposite of imagination is “efficiency.
At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn’t yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.
Give me time, I thought, and I can turn out something much better. This may sound arrogant for someone who not long before had never given a thought to writing a novel. It even sounds arrogant to me. In all honesty, though, anyone who lacks that level of arrogance is unlikely to become a novelist.
What is originality, after all, but the shape that results from the natural impulse to communicate to others that feeling of freedom, that unconstrained joy?
So this is how it is,” I thought. “Time just slips away.
Like two straight lines overlapping, we momentarily crossed at a certain point, then went our separate ways.
I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
It seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That’s why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.
I couldn’t remember a thing I’d ever done to make her hate me that much. But sometimes, without even realizing it, we trample on people’s feelings, hurt their pride, make them feel bad.
Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by the glow of something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how faded it appears. What was I looking at?
Anyone in their right mind would never undertake to write a novel in the first place. Given the circumstances, therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to be deranged as long as you are aware of that fact.
I’ve never liked giving up on a book once I’ve started it. I always hold out hope that there will be some riveting development toward the end, though the chances of that are pretty slim.
But the forecasters and media types were clever – they never used vague words like “maybe.” No, they stuck with convenient terms for which no one could be held accountable, like “probability of precipitation.
These graceful, seamless phrases are like lovely memories, their names hidden, slipping into your dreams. Like fine wind patterns you never want to disappear, leaving gentle traces on the sand dunes of your heart.
It might be a burden to you for me to tell you this, but I think Sayoko always liked you best of all.
A society in which there is not enough room to escape produces deep problems in the educational arena, and necessitates new solutions.
I run in order to acquire a void.