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

But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

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.

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.

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.