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I’ve been sleeping with arms and legs askew, in the posture of a man reluctant to be reminded either of his nature or of the situation in which he finds himself.
The eye was a lone sentry that I’d hired to keep watch on the forest of the night within me, and in doing so I’d forced myself to practice observing my own interior.
leaden, late autumn, predawn sky.
over the path of her own midnight shadow that no one else could see, like a film run in reverse.
This crimson-faced corpse of my friend as it lay proudly remote, decomposing on an army-style cot, was filled with a more urgent sense of reality than it had ever had in twenty-seven years of life—life lived pitifully in a diligent effort to pass through the dark tunnel, only to end abruptly before emerging on the other side.
“Everyone has to die. And in a hundred years nobody’s going to inquire just how most people died. The best thing is to do it in the way that takes your fancy most.”
The tissues of the brain relating to this word, frozen ever since that day, had thawed out.
faintly forlorn.
With a shudder I saw for a moment, in the dark brown mass of her hair, a miniature of myself dead.
Sexual peculiarities aren’t very important in the long run; they’re only one distortion caused by something grotesque and really frightening coiled up in the depths of the personality. There was some enormous, uncontrollable, crazy motive force lurking in the depths of his soul, and it happened to induce a particular distortion called masochism—that’s all. It wasn’t his involvement with masochism that gave birth to the madness leading to his suicide, but the reverse.
And I too have the seeds of that same, incurable madness. . . .
It felt like sacrilege to support my living wife
my person still defiled from contact with the dead.
Ferreting around in the dimmer corners of my memory, it came to me that when I went up behind Takashi he was staring at that photograph as he drank his lemonade.
And the survivors have a steadily deepening suspicion that it is precisely because of the things incapable of communication that the deceased has chosen death.
But like a wounded duck that dives beneath the water, she knew that to surface would mean encountering an immediate hail of anxieties, so she was never entirely free from the fear and disgust, even in her drunkenness.
“In Korean folk tales they say that a woman whose eyes are red like plums has eaten human flesh.”
If anything, it suggested that there was nothing whatsoever that those left behind could do for the dead.
I took the glass from her, and the thin, sinewy, sallow hand fell to her lap like a dying swallow.
to come back to the place where you were born doesn’t mean you’re going to find your roots there,
Since I’ve always been prey to an irrational sense of shame whenever I bang my head against something,
I found a perverted pleasure in waiting for the fresh flaws that my corrections lured from Takashi’s memory and shooting them down as they appeared. Suppressing a certain disgust with myself, I energetically set about stripping the heroic aura from the image of S that Takashi had just built up in my wife’s mind.
it wasn’t a drunkenness that made one see in her eyes and on the very surface of her skin the entrance to that spiral staircase leading down to the terrifying darkness within.
His words showed that he’d grasped the existence of something in the depths of all who had died—died in the grip of a fear they could communicate to no one else.
The self-pity in my voice disgusted even me.
Heaven and earth revolve perpetually; nothing is gone that does not come again.
“When the time comes and, as you say, there’s no going back, perhaps we’ll be a bit kinder to each other.”
my whole body paralyzed as though the dead fly had been a plug holding the motor center of my nervous system in place.
I suspected that on the first raid they’d committed not only murder but some other dreadful act that S’s death alone could never atone for, and that it was knowledge of this that had driven S, even after he’d resolved to serve as sacrificial lamb on the second raid, to lie brooding in a state of despairing melancholy on the floor in the back room downstairs in the storehouse.
the two sides of your personality would come together again in death.
the kind of people who’d go all the way to Africa to catch elephants were humanity’s only hope in his
As I contemplated them in the darkness, the eyes of my cat, companion of many years, became Takashi’s eyes, and the eyes of great-grandfather’s brother whom I’d never known, and my wife’s eyes, red like plums; and they all linked up into a shining ring that was rapidly becoming an undeniable part of my being. They would go on multiplying, I felt sure, throughout the time remaining to me, till a hundred pairs of eyes would glitter like a chain of stars in the night of my experience. And I would live on, suffering agonies of shame under the light of those stars, peering out timidly like a rat,
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uncertain then, was readily understandable now. The “tender” red of the painting was essentially the color of self-consolation,
