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.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

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.

If those sorts of moments would be the only pleasure life offered me, I'd be better off shutting out that one brilliant source of light to let my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness.

Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.