I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.

The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I'm just scared of my own shadow.

If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.