You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.

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

And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.