If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

What happens when people open their hearts?"... "They get better.

People need routines. It's like a theme in music. But it also restrictsyour thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not consciously intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original intention had have been.

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.

How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring.