Yoko Ogawa

Though I’ve tried, I’ve found no way to fill in the voids left by the Memory Police.

The mention of money was probably nothing more than a smoke screen.

they were almost off-putting.

he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

I couldn’t hear him clearly, but I decided not to ask him to repeat himself, in case it had been something less romantic

Jealousy seems to make me suffer in the most unexpected ways

I must have had a good reason for wanting to kill myself, but I’ve forgotten what it was

Identifying those wild creatures was his one true gift.

The disappearance of the birds, as with so many other things, happened suddenly one morning. When I opened my eyes, I could sense something strange, almost rough, about the quality of the air. The sign of a disappearance. Still wrapped in my blanket, I looked carefully around the room. The cosmetics on my dressing table, the paper clips and notes scattered on my desk, the lace of the curtains, the record shelf—it could be anything. It took patience and concentration to figure out what was gone.

realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word “bird”—everything.