“Morning is my favourite time of day,” said Naoko. “It’s like everything’s starting out fresh and new. I begin to get sad around noon time, and I hate it when the sun goes down. I live with those same feelings day after day.” “And while you’re living with those feelings, you youngsters get old just like me,” said Reiko with a smile. “You’re

All I could do was glare at the incomprehensible page of print and wonder what was going to happen to me from now on, and how the things around me would be changing. I felt as if the world was pulsating every now and then.

“Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,”

that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities.

“Not hungry?” she asked, sipping hot tea. “Not really,” I said. “It’s the hospital,” she said, scanning the cafeteria. “This always happens when people aren’t used to the place. The smells, the sounds, the stale air, patients’ faces, stress, irritation, disappointment, pain, fatigue – that’s what does it. It grabs you in the stomach and kills your

Streaming in through the window, the moonlight cast long shadows and splashed the walls with a touch of diluted Indian ink.

dashimaki-style fried egg

“Has it changed much in eight years?” I asked. “You don’t know what I’m feeling now, do you, Watanabe?” “No, I don’t.” “I’m scared,” she said. “So scared, I could go crazy just like that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, flung out here all by myself.” She paused. “But ‘Go crazy just like that.’ Kind of a cool expression, don’t you think?” I

Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.”