It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.

If you don’t say what you’re thinking, you end up lying when you really need to speak up.

Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated.

I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness.

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses. And things of no particular importance, or irreplaceable things, can suddenly resurface in a café one winter night.

Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything.

Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream.