You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.

It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.

I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.