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The blue shade of happiness I long for.
Is happiness associated with blue?
Her skin was perfection, unblemished. The muscles of her lower back led perfectly down to her round buttocks, swelling briefly into powerful thighs.
Ew
his art, his Tokyo and his Naomi most of all. Because she was his, wasn’t she? Sprawled out before him day after day.
NO
The preacher had said, without a trace of doubt, how the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had paid for their sins. Ohashi couldn’t believe his ears for a second when he heard that. Could this man really be saying such a dreadful thing? Did he actually believe the words coming from his mouth? Ohashi had never gone back after that. It made him sick to think of Christians preying on the poor men while they were at their lowest, feeding them with slop food and even worse ideas.
Jesus christ.
Whenever Ohashi went out collecting cans, he tried his best to look around the streets and take in his surroundings. To view the things in the scenery that he felt to be beautiful, the small things that gave him pleasure. The sun rising in the morning, edging its way through the gaps between the buildings, the hazy sky that obscured the tops of the skyscrapers in the distance, the clouds that formed patterns that looked like a clowder of cats chasing one another. Life still had some pleasure for him, no matter how small.
‘Man cannot live by bread alone,’ quoted Taka. ‘But what does the Bible say about onigiri?’ asked Hori. ‘Imagine Jesus trying to open one of those.’ Even Taka allowed himself to laugh at this.
LOL
The city would provide.
In its luminous eyes I saw something. Something chaotic. A city reflected in its irises. It was like the cat saw us all moving around, and just as the image of the city bounced off its eyeballs, so too did the cat reject any idea of human form or control. This cat had no master, and I envied it for that.
Characters shift meaning when placed alongside others, so it’s important we focus on the relationships between them. No character truly exists in isolation, and there’s always a story for even the most complicated or simple of characters.
‘It might surprise you, but not many people working here are actually from the city, unlike me. Most people come here from somewhere else, looking for happiness. But what they find here . . . well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’
