All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.