The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

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.

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.

We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.

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

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

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.