Like boarding a train running parallel. That’s what disappearing is.

When did my youth slip away from me? I suddenly thought. It was over, wasn’t it? Seemed just like yesterday I was still only half grown up. Huey Lewis and the News had a couple...

Like Naokuo, I’m not really sure what it means to love another person. Though she meant it a little differently. I do want to try my best though. I have to, or else I won’t...

How many times in her thirty years had she heard the same remarks, the same feeble jokes about her name?

I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might be a few — very few, I would imagine- who are impressed by it, but rarely would anyone like it.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

Are you asking because you really want an answer?

For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a “Reserved” sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact...

Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on...

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved...

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 dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'” she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn’t surprise me if she wrote it down. “So what does that really mean? In...

Lo que quiero decir es que el dolor se vuelve crónico. Engullido por la vida diaria, uno deja de saber cuáles son las heridas. Pero están ahí. Así son las heridas: no se pueden coger...

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who...

You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at...

Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Gust have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust....

When I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up...

That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical

He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many things he didn’t know. Yet had he been...

He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it...

El amor que se profesaban era tan verdadero que no había ninguna necesidad de ponerlo a prueba. El destino los había unido con un lazo tan fuerte que solo es posible encontrar uno igual entre...

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the...

His biases played a large role here, but for Komatsu bias was an important element of truth.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never,...

Quello che voglio dire è che una condizione del genere dopo un po’ diventa cronica. La ferita è riassorbita nella quotidianità e non ci si ricorda più dov’è. Ma rimane. Non è una cosa che...

Anyhow, even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere...