Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ

“Do you remember my friend Fumiko Kobayashi? She loaned me a book by a university professor named Taki Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behaviour, and she writes that death, particularly voluntary death, is surrounded in this country by a heroic, romantic, aesthetic and emotional aura. She says we often find it hard to communicate and use suicide to make our ideas, or beliefs, or sufferings known. I don't know whether I believe that or not.”
― James Trager, Letters from Sachiko: A Japanese Woman's View of Life in the Land of the Economic Miracle

“Beautifully manipulated and in utter abandonment,
Raising upon the swell of the chanter’s voice,
She weeps and weeps as if to drown herself,
Okaru weeps…”
― Hakushū Kitahara

“I’m afraid I don’t really have a clear understanding of the psychology of the powerful- particularly the absolutely invincible variety, which I’ve never met or known to exist. I’m a story writer with such feeble imaginative powers that unless I myself have experienced something, I can’t write one line- I can’t write a word- about it.”
― Osamu Dazai, Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

“Robbers, thieves, smugglers, and cheats know their own local and personal circumstances and conditions extremely well, and pay the most active attention to their business; but it by no means follows therefrom, that society is in the best condition where such individuals are at least restrained in the exercised of their private industry.”
― Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy