Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.