The Great Passage

by Shion Miura

been addressed to him. Flustered, he shook his head. “A dictionary is a ship that crosses the sea of words,” said Araki, with a sense that he was laying bare his innermost soul. “People travel on it and gather the small points of light floating on the dark surface of the waves. They do this in order to tell someone their thoughts accurately, using the best possible words. Without dictionaries, all any of us could do is linger before the vastness of the deep.”

What if the interior of a room mirrors the interior of its inhabitant?

However much food you ate, as long as you were alive, you would experience hunger again, and words, however you managed to capture them, would disperse again like phantoms into the void.

Ease up, Majime, he thought. Otherwise everyone around you is going to end up choking. Expectations and demands that weigh too heavy are poison. You’ll be worn down in the end, when you don’t get what you’re looking for. You’ll wind up exhausted, resigned, and alone, unable to trust anyone.

Awakening to the power of words—the power not to hurt others but to protect them, to tell them things, to form connections with them—had taught her to probe her own mind and inclined her to make allowances for other people’s thoughts and feelings.

I go for used books, but I’m no potted plant. I’m an omnivore! And yes, when I go to a used bookstore I think about books. What else! Anybody who thought about their laundry while looking at books—anybody that incapable of concentrating on what was in front of them—could never qualify as a true used book lover.

They had made a ship. A ship bearing the souls of people traveling from ancient times toward the future, across the ocean rich with words.