I'm an average person. Is just that I like reading.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.

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.

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual.