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“I respect intuition,” Tamaru said. “But once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
will give birth to this child. This little life will be safely born into the world. Like Tamaru had put it, as an unavoidable bearer of morality.
He followed his daily routine, and she followed hers. But without her there, Tengo noticed a human-shaped void she had left behind.
Before he had realized it, these exercises had given him the talent to be skeptical about his own self, and he had come to the recognition that most of what is generally considered the truth is entirely relative.
Subject and object are not as distinct as most people think. If the boundary separating the two isn’t clear-cut to begin with, it is not such a difficult task to intentionally shift back and forth from one to the other.
But time slowly chips away at life. People don’t just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts.
A dreamless sleep, a pure blank in time.
He finally finished peeing—the operation taking as long as it would take a long freight train to cross a bridge—zipped up his pants, shut his eyes, and gave a deep sigh of relief.
There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m completely sane. It’s the world around me that’s gone crazy. And I have to find out why.
To rephrase Tolstoy’s famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.
As time went on, he found it necessary to build partitions and divisions in the house, and a second floor, and later he added on several wings. He created paintings himself on the wall. These were suggestive of the development and split in individual consciousness.
if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other.”
It was such a long time, Tengo thought too. At the same time, though, he noticed how the twenty years that had passed now held no substance. It had all passed by in an instant, and took but an instant to be filled in.
Something deep inside her struck a chord in her heart. Despite all that happened, I never
lost myself, she thought. Thank goodness I can be here, as me. Wherever here is.
