you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time. Do you think you can do that?”

“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone.

I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It’s a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists – in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table – and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

I saw that she was crying. Before I knew it, I was kissing her. Others on the platform were staring at us, but I didn’t care about such things any more. We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live.

“Letters are just pieces of paper,” I said. “Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”

“But I can’t forget her,” I said. “I told Naoko I would go on waiting for her, but I couldn’t do it. I turned my back on her in the end. I’m not saying anyone’s to blame: it’s a problem for me myself. I do think that things would have worked out the same way even if I hadn’t turned my back on her. Naoko was choosing death all along. But that’s

“But she said, ‘No, that’s not it, Reiko. I’m not worried about that at all. I just don’t want anybody going inside me again. I just don’t want to be violated like that again – by anybody’.”