Sublime

gnomish quality about everything. A smaller-than-life quality, with a dash of the droll. What is this five-thousand-year-old book? The Mickey Mouse watch, Mr Tagomi himself, the fragile cup in Mr Tagomi’s hand … and, on the wall facing Mr Baynes, an enormous buffalo head, ugly and menacing.

They took us as we cried out with pleasure and then covered our mouths in shame.

pernicious

The laughter turns to groans. Blindness and unreason, rampant.

cajole

derelict

all of them, Tengo would tell himself that this was not the place where he belonged. He had been mistakenly locked in a cage. Someday his real parents, guided by sheer good fortune, would find him.

On her fourteenth birthday, he gives her a bowdlerized translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.