Riku Onda > Quotes

“There is an old saying to the effect that when an elderly person dies a library disappears.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Non-fiction? I'm not keen on the word. No matter how much a writer tries to adhere to the truth, the notion of non-fiction is an illusion. All that can exist is fiction visible to the eye. And what is visible can also lie. The same applies to that which we hear and touch. Fictions that exist and fictions that don't exist- that's the level of difference, in my opinion.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“There are two kinds of people in this world, I believe, those who frequent bookshops and those who do not.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“I feel reassured that the world is full of books that people are steadily reading their way through. No matter how much information may be available, or how easy it is to come by, when all is said and done books can only be read by working one’s way through them, line by line, page by page.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Fear is a spice that lends credibility. Just the right amount sprinkled in any story makes it plausible.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“If my life were a book, the thickest section, the one with the most dog-eared pages, would be the one about that case. The spine would be bent from being opened to those pages so often. And the book would always fall open to that place. That's how I see it.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“I hope you understand that truth is nothing more than one view of a subject seen from a particular perspective.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Quite a few people became depressed once the crime was solved. It seemed so pointless. If the culprit had at least had a strong motive, it might have been easier to understand. Once it was all over, people felt as if they had been left in limbo. Yes, they did. Many people expressed doubt as to whether the man who committed suicide really was the culprit.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Yes, people are indeed a mystery. The way they present themselves changes according to the place and person they are with.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“But as I grew older, every time I saw an injustice or something I couldn't understand, I felt something surreptitiously stirring deep down inside, slowly working its way up from the depths. Over time this sense of unease built up and felt more solid. I don't remember what the trigger was, but one day I realized I had to do something about it. I knew I couldn't go on with life as usual until I'd removed that accumulation of uneasiness. If I didn't, I knew I'd suffocate.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“There are some people who you can never understand, even if they are relatives, like parents, or children, or brothers and sisters. Is that wrong? Isn’t acknowledging that lack of understanding, and giving up, one kind of understanding? That’s the kind of thing I think about. But in this day and age, society doesn’t forgive those it doesn’t understand. To not be understood leaves you open to bullying, or gets you labelled suspicious. If you’re not convincing in the eyes of society it makes you vulnerable to attack. Everything has to be by the book – reduced and standardized. The reason for anger is, more often than not, simply lack of understanding.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“the notion of non-fiction is an illusion. All that can exist is fiction visible to the eye. And what is visible can also lie. The same applies to that which we hear and touch. Fictions that exist and fictions that don’t exist – that’s the level of difference, in my opinion.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Every person spoke in the sincere belief that what they said was the absolute truth, but if one thinks about it, it’s difficult to describe an actual event in words exactly as one sees it. More like impossible, in my opinion. Each person has their own idiosyncratic biases, visual impressions and tricks of memory that shape their perception, and when one also takes into consideration the individual knowledge, education and personality that influence each single viewpoint, one can see how infinite the possibilities are.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“I don’t have any great ambitions for myself. It’s enough for me if the three of us can lead safe, healthy lives. A peaceful life is best. But such a modest ambition is becoming more and more difficult to achieve. People may try to live quiet, retiring lives, but things can happen. They might get caught up in a crime, or ill from food additives. The way society works or businesses operate can change in a flash, and even as you wish things would stay the same, a giant wave engulfs everything. It’s tragic when people think the wave won’t reach them but get swept away by it anyway. The wave takes everything with it, you hurt all over, and you’re left holding on to nothing.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“I am already out at sea. Floating in the water while gazing back at the innocent girl on dry sand who believes that she will never get wet.
It won't be long. Any second now the wave will arrive to wash around her feet and strike terror into her heart. Then she will know. She will understand that a woman's place is in the sea. Where the acts of floundering, drowning and gulping mouthfuls of salty water while struggling to swim against the current are the true essence of our sex.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“That’s how I came to believe that it’s impossible to ever really know the truth behind events. Once one accepts this, it follows that everything written in newspapers or textbooks as “history” is actually an amalgam of the greatest common factors from all the information available.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Of course, human agency and contrivance are at the centre of this particular snowball, and probably repressed emotions have something to do with it as well, but I believe that terrible things – terrible beyond anything that humans could devise – can happen due to a series of circumstances coinciding with some kind of trigger. Such events are then presented to us in the form of a great calamity, as if to mock our puny human desires. Do you see what I mean? My feeling is that this crime was something like that.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Every person spoke in the sincere belief that what they said was the absolute truth, but if one thinks about it, it's difficult to describe an actual event in words exactly as one sees it. More like impossible, in my opinion. Each person has their own idiosyncratic biases, visual impressions and tricks of memory that shape their perception, and when one also takes into consideration the individual knowledge, education and personality that influence each single viewpoint, one can see how infinite the possibilities are.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“That was how I chose to deal with it. I felt I had no other choice.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“That's why it's a mistake to believe it's realistic to think about surviving in a world that can't be understood.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“That’s right. Sometimes people get caught up in events beyond their understanding. They get ambushed under the guise of chance. Things happen and it seems as if they’re in another world or dimension. When something like that occurs, nobody can explain what’s really going on… Well, of course they can’t.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Even if a person experiences enviable peaks of happiness, a fulfilled life, all happiness still carries with it the loneliness inherent in being human.”
― Riku Onda, Honeybees and Distant Thunder

“After a bit she asked if I thought people’s dreams are connected. I told her that the dreams of people who are thinking about each other are. “Gosh, that’s nice,” she said.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“Some women do drag their pasts around, and I don't deny that I have that tendency too. But I usually keep that part of me closeted away in a separate room: the guest room, so to speak, where the guest can feel sorry for herself at leisure. Only occasionally do I invite her into the living room and allow her to wallow in self-pity to her heart's content.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“Yes, as time went by, I began to travel again in order to see things I had a fancy to see. Mind you, they didn’t necessarily exist in reality any more. My travels became a quest for the sources of memories, things that I had ostensibly seen before. Scenes from childhood, for example, or locations with nostalgic associations and the like.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“In our early days together we often gave each other gifts. CDs we liked, books, photographs, travel souvenirs, or cakes and other small delicacies. When people are in the process of becoming intimate they give each other things, all kinds of small, miscellaneous offerings. Every exchange leaves a mark of one's existence in the others world and gradually widens the scope of it. Thus by degrees we become special to each other. That's how we were supposed to be.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“We are here together right now because of countless choices that were made but which we had no part in deciding.

If everything in life is a choice, then what does it mean to love a person? If love is merely a means for genes to satisfy a self-interested desire for descendants, then surely physical desire is enough for the purpose?

Perhaps love is a mechanism to ensure that helpless, immature human beings are cared for after coming into the world?”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“Green that verges on darkness.”
― Riku Onda, The Aosawa Murders

“What kind of job was it to be a musician? What sort of vocation was it, anyway? Vocation - that was the perfect word for it. It really was a calling, a living calling. It didn't fill your stomach, didn't last. To devote your life to something like that, the only way you could describe it was as a calling.”
― Riku Onda, Honeybees and Distant Thunder

“The highest form of human achievement was music. Human beings might have dirty, repulsive aspects to them, but out of the sordid swamp that was humanity - no, it was precisely because of this chaotic swamp - the beautiful lotus flower of music would bloom.”
― Riku Onda, Honeybees and Distant Thunder