Mieko Kawakami

Just seeing you, though, I feel, I dunno, happamine.”

People always forget about these little things, but I believe that each one stays somewhere deep in everyone’s heart, and without noticing it they grow and harden, until one day they cause something terrible to happen

You haven’t gone to see her, not for ages. And if it goes on like that forever, then you’ll never see her again.”

It’s like at school you see everybody because they go to school every day. But when you graduate and you don’t go to school any more, it stops and you don’t see everybody any more. If you want to see somebody, you have to make plans to meet, or even make plans to make plans, and next thing you end up not seeing them any more. That’s what’s going to happen. If you don’t see somebody, you end up never seeing them. And then there’s going to be nothing left of them at all.”

My first visit to Tokyo Station was ten years earlier, the summer I turned twenty.

Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners.

It felt like picking up a picture you had seen a million times and realizing it had changed entirely, without you ever noticing.

But if Makiko had any other choice, she wouldn’t work nights at the bar or leave Midoriko alone.

I guess I could say that I expected my body would have some sort of value.

life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that my body has aged another ten years.