It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

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.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.