More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 12 - June 17, 2023
Once or twice a week, she and I would sit on the sofa, drinking the tea her mother made for us, and spend the afternoon listening to Rossini overtures, Beethoven’s Pastorale, and the Peer Gynt Suite.
Oh, another music reference.
Second, no one around me–with the exception of Shimamoto, of course–ever listened to Liszt’s piano concertos. The very idea excited me. I’d found a world that no one around me knew—a secret garden only I was allowed to enter.
Second music ref. Anw is this counted as falling in love?? You feel like you have a world only both of you can enter and you feel elevated by that idea.
Nat King Cole was singing “Pretend.” Of course, we had no idea then what the English lyrics meant.
Third reference.
“After a certain length of time has passed, things harden up. Like cement hardening in a bucket. And we can’t go back anymore. What you want to say is that the cement that makes you up has hardened, so the you you are now can’t be anyone else.”
How come 12yo girl said something like this?
Shafira Indika liked this
But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.
What confused and disappointed me, though, was that I could never discover within her something special that existed just for me.
You cant peel her off even when you know that she likes you, right? Feels like she's just being good to you like she does with everyone else?
If only I’d been able to pin down what that was, I know we would have ended up sleeping together.
Lah jancoookkk just for the sake of bedding her??
What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.
Small realities or you just touch deprived. Ya tapii i get it sih, when you completely naked in front of other person, there was this sense of... bareness?
I like you a lot, I said, so how can I forget you that easily? But I wasn’t so sure.
Hmmmm tanda tanda
A simple change of scenery can bring about powerful shifts in the flow of time and emotions:
Nah kan, soalnya u udah ngalamiiinnn
From the first time I saw that girl, I knew I wanted to sleep with her. More accurately, I knew I had to sleep with her.
The fuck with this primal instinc /insert crying emoji/
Shafira Indika liked this
That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.
Linking arms with strangers at demonstrations made me uneasy, and when we had to hurl rocks at the cops, I asked myself if this was really me. Was this what I wanted?
Weirdly relatable lol, looking back it felt like an emotional outburst
No matter what, I’d be damned if I’d ever return to the kind of life I had in my twenties—days of loneliness and isolation.
Asking to my 30ish year old self: will i?
While my wife was pregnant I’d had a few flings, but nothing serious. I never slept with any one woman more than once or twice. Okay, three times, tops.
BOMBASTIC SIDE EYE CRIMINAL OFFENSIVE SIDE EYE
Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things just vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.
The last thing I wanted was for Izumi to see the article. How would she feel if she saw me, blithely living a happy life, seemingly unscarred by our past?
Ohhh so you can feel some guilts too
“I thought if I met you you’d want to know all about me. Whether I was married, where I lived, what I’d been up to, those kinds of things. Am I right?” “Well, I’m sure those would come up.” “Of course.” “But you’d rather not talk about those?”
SHE'S SOOOO ME OMG
“Up to elementary school I did fine, but after that it was awful. It was like I was stuck inside a well.” I knew the feeling. That was just how I felt about the eight years of my life between college and marrying Yukiko. One thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there’s no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.
Fuck this hits too close.
From college to those bleak textbook-company years, come evening I’d listen to the Such Sweet Thunder album, the “Star-Crossed Lovers” track over and over. Johnny Hodges had this sensitive and elegant solo on it.
Fourth? music reference
Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
This is a bar, after all. People come when they want to, leave when they feel like it. My job’s just to wait for them.”
“You don’t read novels anymore?” “I do. But not as many as I used to. I don’t know anything about new novels. I only like old ones, mostly from the nineteenth century. Ones I’ve read before.” “What’s wrong with new novels?” “I guess I’m afraid of being disappointed. Reading trashy novels makes me feel I’m wasting time. It wasn’t always that way. I used to have lots of time, so even though I knew they were junk, I still felt something good would come from reading them. Now it’s different. Must be getting old.”
He would get trashed on booktwt if he said this lol anyway i kind of relate with this... esp fantasy ones
So once you find someone with talent, you’d best take good care of them and never let them go. Not to mention pay them well.”
Hear him dear bosses!!!
Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”
“Are you always this kind to everybody?” “Not to everybody,” I said. “To you I am. I can’t be kind to everyone. There are limits to my kindness; even to how kind I can be to you. I wish there weren’t; then I could do so much more for you. But I can’t.”
She wants me, I thought. And I want her. But somehow I held myself in check. I had to stop right where I was. One more step, and there would be no turning back.
Oh so you still have some dignity.
“As long as you keep a few things in mind, you’ll do okay. First, don’t set the woman up with her own place. That’s a definite mistake. Second, no matter what, come back home by two a.m. Two a.m. is the point of no return. Finally, don’t use your friends as excuses to cover up your affairs. You may be found out. If that happens, well, there’s not much you can do about it. But there’s no need to lose a friend in the process.”
Wtf with this advice from a cheater enabler?? Mertua sendiri pulaaaa
“How about you? Do you love both of your daughters the same?” “Sure.” “That’s ‘cause they’re both still little,” he said. “Wait till they grow up. First you’ll like this one, but then you’ll start leaning toward the other. Someday you’ll see what I mean.”
Oh?? OH?
Suddenly Izumi came to mind. That man had hurt Yukiko deeply, and I had done the same to Izumi. Yukiko happened to meet me after that, but Izumi was all alone.
Karma?? It is weirdly connected lol
What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.
“the sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay forever.”
She wanted me then. Her heart was open to me. Yet I held myself back, back on the surface of the moon, stuck in this lifeless world. And in the end she left me, and my life was lost all over again.
Her loss, then. You chose COMMITMENT!!! That is the truth!!
You said you can only come up with eight million yen. Yukiko, we’re talking about real money here, not Monopoly money. Most people ride to work every day, smashed together in packed trains, put in overtime, knock themselves out, and still couldn’t come near making that much in a year. I lived that kind of life for eight years, so I know. And there was no way I could make eight million yen. But you probably can’t picture that kind of life.”
Speaking facts, i see. Gotta admit he is a gentleman.
Once again a pang of regret swept over me for not having called out to her. I had nothing to tie me down then, nothing to lose. I could have held her close, and the two of us could have walked off together. No matter what situation she was stuck in, we could have found a way out. But I’d lost that chance forever.
“For a while is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting,”
“And probably is a word whose weight is incalculable.”
“Lovers born under an unlucky star,” she said. “Sounds like it was written for the two of us.” “You mean we’re lovers?” “You think we’re not?”
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star,” I said. “It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
“I love you,” I told her. “Nothing can change it. Special feelings like that should never, ever be taken away. I’ve lost you many times. But I should never have let you go. These last several months have taught me that I love you, and I don’t want you ever to leave me.”
BRUHHHHH THIS SADDENS ME BUT YOU HAVE A WIFE HAJIMEEEEE
Our bodies had become one, yet in the end she refused to open up her heart to me.
Tragic.
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an alternate reality—to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw.
Vaguely, as if looking through a glass window at changes happening to someone else, I could detect a minute shift in gravity and a gradual sloughing off of something that had clung to me. Something inside me was severed, and disappeared. Silently. Forever.
Dude this looks scary
