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.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

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.

Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.

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.

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