Number9Dream: A Novel

“I honestly think they would have been happier if I had done a two-year course in applied cosmetics at a women’s college, married the family dentist’s son, and spawned a hive of babies. Music. You eat it, but it eats you, too.”

Endings are simple, but every beginning is made by the beginning before. The one I shall choose is a night in the rainy season nine years ago.

An alcoholic, she says, is three things: a wounded person who desperately needs love and support; a person controlled by a parasite that lives in that person but is not that person; and a wounded person who will devour love and support until nobody and nothing remain.

“If your music sounds half as good to the judges as it did to me last night, you should breeze through it.” “I think you may be biased, Miyake. No points are awarded for neck contours. Anyway, nobody breezes into a Paris Conservatoire scholarship. You drag yourself there by your fingernails, over the corpses of slaughtered hopefuls.

After the head of the thunder god vanishes into the ocean, I skirt the ridge above my grandmother’s house. No light is on. An autumn morning, when rain is always ten minutes away. I climb. Waterfalls without names, waxy leaves, berries in jade pools. I climb. Boughs sag, ferns fan, roots trip. I climb. I eat peanuts and oranges, to make sure I can

courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.

During Anju’s and my dinosaur period, we found a theory claiming the great extinction occurred because the dinosaurs gagged to death on their own dung. We laughed for an hour, nonstop. Trying to get anywhere in Tokyo, the theory no longer seems so laughable. I feel I am gagging to death here. I hate its sidewalk-to-rooftop advertising, its capsules

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

He did not mention his insomnia: not even to his best friend, Pithecanthropus, and certainly not to Mrs. Comb, who was sure to prescribe a curative bitterer than the complaint.