Breasts and Eggs

I’d picked most of them up at used bookstores in Osaka, but I got my copies of Faulkner’s Light in August and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks from this young guy who showed up at the bar one day. This was after Mum and Komi died, when I was in my first year of high school. I didn’t remember the guy’s name, much less his face. He j

Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m glad the book was a success,” Sengawa said, “but you can’t count on celebrities who read one book every five years to help you find your base. I’m not saying sales don’t matter. It’s just that readers matter a whole lot more. You need to find real readers, the kind who will seriously stick with you, who will stick with you after the hype dies

The lower shelves were where I kept the paperbacks I figured I’d never read again. The names on the spines, Herman Hesse, Raymond Radiguet, and Kyusaku Yumeno, had all faded in the sun. Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, and my Dostoyevsky, The Gambler, Notes from Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov. Chekhov, Camus, Steinbeck. The Odyssey

“Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.

When people say they want kids, what is it they actually want? Lots of folks would say they want to have a baby with their partner, but what’s the difference between wanting that and wanting your own baby? It felt like people with kids knew something at the onset that I still couldn’t understand.

“What made that work special? What made it yours? It wasn’t the setting or the theme or any of the ideas. It wasn’t any of that. It’s your voice, the writing, the rhythm. It has incredible personality, and that matters more than anything if you’re going to keep writing. You need to hold on to that, your rhythm.”

The flowers in that first photo really matched our dresses. The second photo was of Midoriko poking her face out of one of Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted pumpkins. The third photo was Midoriko again, her hair blowing in the ocean breeze. The blue sky looked like it could shatter any second. I hadn’t seen Midoriko in forever. She looked like she was ha

“Whenever I read that sort of thing, or every time an exhausted colleague complains to me—and of course this is between you and me—I’m shocked by how shallow and selfish they are. Really. You can see it coming, too. It’s just like, you wanted this, you did this. How can you complain about it now? It’s not like I don’t understand. It’s a long time,