A Clean Kill in Tokyo Quotes

“I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally... Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver... and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people's mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about.”
― Barry Eisler, Rain Fall

“But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“the corruption is the society. The rust has penetrated so deep that the superstructure is made of it. You cannot simply rip it all out without precipitating a collapse of the society that rests on it.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that.” He”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Tatsu was true samurai, and would continue serving the same master no matter how many times that master ignored or even abused him. Devoted service was the highest end he knew. It”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour. The”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“old age and treachery will beat youth and reflexes every time.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that’s the way things are. Things end. That’s mono no aware.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Tatsu had a dry way of saying ‘of course’ that always seemed to emphasize some lack of mental acuity on the part of the listener.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“America has always needed such transcendental notions to bind together its citizens, who have come from different cultures all over the world. And Americans are then driven to prove the universality of these ideas, and so their validity, by aggressively converting other cultures. In a religious context, this behavior would be recognized as missionary in its origins and effect.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Keisatsucho”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“probity”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group. But I can tell you as the Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“detritus”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“demimonde,”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“entreaty,”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“When you’ve known someone only briefly, even if intensely, death comes as a shock, but not a particularly long or deep one. After all, there was no time for the person in question to become woven tightly into the fabric of your life. It’s surprising, even a little disillusioning, how quickly you get over it, how quickly the memory of what you might have shared with someone comes to seem distant, improbable, like something that might have happened to someone you know but not to you yourself.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group. But”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.” At”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“There wasn’t any”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“When your sword meets that of your enemy, you can never waver, but must instead attack with the complete resolution of your whole body… —Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo