Arthur Golden

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.

I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.