I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.

Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

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.

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