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

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

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

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.

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

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.