Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands. 'I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi,' Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.

Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.

That's what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.

Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.