Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.

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.

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

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

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.

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.