A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

For a person to be appropriate to serve as such a model, he or she needs to be highly out of the ordinary while possessing something that might be seen as a kind of template for humanity or for the age and must be purified via fiction until they reach the dimension of the symbol.

I suppose it’s a fact that the present is a result of the past. In other words, one is able to love someone in the present thanks to the past that made them the way they are.

if that person had lived under different circumstances, they would have probably become a different person—but people are incapable of telling others their entire past, and regardless of their intentions, the past explained in words is not the past itself.

The dead cannot call out to us. All they can do is wait for us to call to them. Except for the dead whose names are unknown. Uncalled by anyone, they sink ever deeper into solitude.

Could mendacious sincerity, consummately performed, be the ultimate deception?

Absolutely poggers sentence

Ashamed of himself and jealous of happier couples, he imagined living out his days with an unsatiated sex drive and felt vaguely sad.

Mood

It’s unbearable to have your identity summed up by one thing and one thing only and for other people to have control over what that is.”

Basically, Kido hated the very idea of collecting human beings into categories.

Have you heard of triangular desire? Was it René Girard? The idea is that human beings never desire others one-on-one but develop an attraction for someone because there is a rival that wants them too.”

“Love for another might remain the same love even as it keeps on changing. Or perhaps we can go further and say that love persists precisely because it changes.”