It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.

Learning another language is like becoming another person.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

How many times have you said, 'This is it. I've finally found my one true love'? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing - the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture - can make love shatter, stall or fade away.

As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.