However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and there was no reason for the two of us not to get married. The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground.

Familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible. Only the violence is vivid enough to stick.

I became even calmer.

How on earth could she be so self-centered? I stared at her lowered eyes, her expression of cool self-possession. The very idea that there should be this other side to her, one where she selfishly did as she pleased, was astonishing. Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable?

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.

“I don’t deserve you,” he used to say, before they were married. “Your goodness, your stability, how calm you always are—the way you just get on with things, and make it look so easy…” Respect—that was what she’d taken his words to connote, but might they not in fact have been intended as a confession, that whatever it was he felt for her, it was

Back on the platform at Wangsimni, it wasn’t only the pain from the operation that caused her legs to tremble. When the train eventually roared into the platform, she staggered behind one of the metal chairs and hid herself, afraid that something inside her would make her throw herself in front of the solid mass of the train.

she’d practically stopped sleeping.

I couldn’t get my head around it. It wasn’t as though she had shapely breasts which might suit the “no-bra look.” I would have preferred her to go around wearing one that was thickly padded, so that I could save face in front of my acquaintances.