No breathing room between the buildings, which means unagi restaurants rubbing shoulders with telephone clubs, and estate agents sharing walls with sex shops. Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners. Seal-engraving businesses whose owners never bothered coming in. Video arcades that looked anything but fun.

absurdly smoky motsuyaki restaurants,

They’re on a pedestal from the second they’re born, only they don’t realize it. Whenever they need something, their mums come running. They’re taught to believe that their penises make them superior, and that women are just there for them to use however they see fit. Then they go out into the world, where everything centers around them and their

every writer ends up creating their own language. Your style is an invention.

When it swung you upside down and started falling, it was like the wind had been knocked out of you. I wonder if that sensation, this whole-body scream, has a name. What part of your body does it come from? What the hell is actually happening? This always makes me think about the people who jump off of buildings. They say it’s only a handful of

Over time, I realized how I felt about him. Hearing from him turned my day around. If I read something or saw some cute animal video, I wanted him to see it, too. I imagined us listening to my favorite songs together. I wanted us to talk about our favorite books and really delve into our thoughts about the world.

on in the middle of the empty changing room, I felt like I’d been left behind, trapped inside the weathered skeleton of an enormous creature that had shed its flesh and skin. Then I started to feel as though it was me, that my body had become the empty husk. The feeling was more desolate than anything I’d ever felt, like I was watching myself

How many more times in my life would I sit back like this and find myself transfixed by the blue of the evening? Is this what it means to live and die alone? That you’ll always be in the same place, no matter where you are?

If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.