I Am a Japanese Writer

Once he’d left, I sent a telegram to my publisher: “I am no longer a writer.” That’s not the title of a novel. Mind you, it wouldn’t be a bad one—in perfect harmony with my progress towards minimalism. Absolute zero, though, would be: “I am no longer.”

One secret always hides another—the one that you really do want to hide.

You don’t hide your secret in your heart, but in your ass.

It’s always important to appropriate the story.

In life, we always take the wrong path at the right time.

You don’t just meet a girl, I’ve come to see, you meet a culture. And you don’t leave that culture easily. It takes five unhappy affairs to break free from a culture as powerful as Japan’s.

Every time I broke in to tell a story about him, he cut me off, the better to batter me with compliments. I felt as though I belonged to him. With his prodigious memory, so flattering to me, he had taken over my life. I had been dispossessed of myself. Beware of those who love you.

“Maybe Japan wants to be something else as well.”
“No. Japan just wants to be Japan. That’s the saddest part of it.”

“You know the book hasn’t been written yet.”
“But its impact is real. People might be disappointed if you wrote it.”

“‘The Japanese right’? Aren’t they all on the right?”