A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

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

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.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

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

The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.