What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.

Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.