Ryu Murakami

Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things.

. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there

The bastard gets all pumped up talking about baseball, and then when I try to join in he suddenly loses interest and seems anxious to drop the subject altogether.

Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, why do you have this karoshi problem, people literally working themselves to death? Or: Girls from poor Asian countries I can understand, but why do high-school girls in a country as wealthy as Japan prostitute themselves? Or: Wherever you go in the world, people work in order to make their families happy, so why doesn’t anybody in Japan complain about the tanshin-funin system that sends businessmen off to live on their own in distant cities or countries? I

But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can’t help smiling? Why is there such agreement around the world about what is or isn’t a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they’d get an urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they’d get an urge to kill it? Something tells me there must be people like that somewhere, Kenji.”

. I stretched briefly, thinking: Could the view possibly be any bleaker?

I took the coins, thinking: If he had change, why didn’t he pull it out at the photo booth?

What this was supposed to prove, I couldn’t tell you. Genuine rich guys never carry a lot of cash around, and I didn’t see any credit cards in there.

Parents, teachers, government—they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

ast, a man from Texas, had told me how astonished he was when he went to Shibuya. He said: “I thought I was in Harlem or someplace, all those kids walking around looking like black hip-hop artists, wearing their Walkmans, some had skateboards, too, but what was amazing was, here they are completely copying the fashions of African-