Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you'll never see reflected what's inside.

Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper.

People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.