If you aren’t the woman I think you are, then this isn’t the world I thought it was.
Can’t you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.
We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.
Of course, a sign doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
I don’t know when we’ll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness– a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters.
And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
At the temple there is a poem called “Loss” carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
I began to feel that all the people I’d ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man’s wife lived on inside him.
I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my “Noh smile” because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I’ve relied on it.
When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn’t throw it away.
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn’t it
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world.
When a man takes a mistress, he doesn’t turn around and divorce his wife.
Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.
Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
Oh I’m sure you’re right,” Auntie said. “Probably she’s just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.
When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
If he couldn’t forgive you for what you’d done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.
But, Mameha-san, I don’t want kindness!”“Don’t you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you’re in no position to ask.
If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.
I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.
I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.
My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, ” he explained. “I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals – true equals – only when they both have equal confidence.
When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.
Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
I would’ve had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn’t so simple. I’d been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.
Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.
He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. “Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.