Status Updates From Kakigori Summer

There’s no ending to a story, just like there isn’t any beginning. There’s only where you choose to start telling it, and where you decide to stop. The thing that goes on, and on, and on, is life, in all its grimness and sorrow, and pockets of beauty and love so spectacular they’re almost too bright to see.

It is not acceptable to look at someone else’s life and think, please god don’t let me end up like that, especially if you don’t even have an alternative suggestion.

It feels like I’ve been sitting in the dark by myself for a long time, me and the monsters in my head, but now somebody’s opened the door a crack. I don’t want to go too near, in case it closes again, but I can hear sounds on the other side, and imagine what it would feel like to step through it.

I suddenly remember that there’ll always be coffee, that whatever happens, somewhere in the world people will be waking up to that hopeful smell, and another day. That seems like a kind of magic.

You can have everything the way you want it, by yourself.

There’s no exact translation for ‘cosy’ in Japanese, like there isn’t for ‘yorimichi’ in English, a word that gets translated as ‘detour’ but suggests the places you go when you don’t want to go home and you’re wandering to find an excuse to stay out, or ‘waku waku’, ostensibly the onomatopoeic sound of your heartbeat, but adding this excitement and uncertainty and wide-eyed coyness that doesn’t really come across wh

It’s absurd just how much slack genetics cuts people.

Japanese has planned for that, with stock phrases that could keep you going forever, perpetually making polite noises and saying nothing at all.

they were married for almost half a century – an unexpected romance or a case of two practical people behaving exactly as society stipulated, depending on who you ask.

polite but immoveable, a Japanese trait I’ve always admired and found infuriating in equal measur

Obaachan is so unprepared to entertain things that exist outside her version of reality that it’s never entirely clear if she repels unwelcome information through force of will, or knows exactly what’s going on and just refuses to discuss things she considers below contempt.

Obaachan has never been afraid to air her opinions on plane travel (or on anything at all, in fact) – that it’s self-indulgent and above the station of a human being, and doing something so unnatural and self-aggrandising is basically asking for curses to be rained upon you.