Status Updates From Thousand Cranes

“Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her.
　She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.”

‘But when you see the bowl, you forget the defects of the old owner. Father’s life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.’
　‘Death, waiting at your feet. I’m frightened. I’ve tried so many things. I’ve tried thinking that with death itself at my feet I can’t be forever held by Mother’s death.’
　‘When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself.’

‘If it was guilt,’ she continued, ‘it may never go away. But sorrow will.’
　‘When you talk about darkness, aren’t you making your mother’s death darker than you need to?’
　‘I should have said the degree of sorrow.’
　‘The degree of sorrow.’
　‘Is the degree of love,’ he wanted to add; but he stopped himself.

‘Mother and I suffered together, and with the suffering still here… Mother and I both presume a great deal on people, but we expect them to understand us. Is that impossible? Are we seeing our reflections in our own hearts?’

“He looked out toward the cottage. In front of it there was a large oleander, heavy with blossoms, a vague white blue. For the rest, the night was so dark that he had trouble following the line between trees and sky.”

“Even while she was annoying him, she rarely said things that startled by their incongruity. Everything went with the self-loathing that had become a part of Kikuji’s nature.”

'Fireflies? At this time of the year?' She thrust her head forward. 'It's almost fall. There are still fireflies, are there? Like ghosts.’

‘It’s the good things that attract the villains.’

‘Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I’m watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.’

‘You can’t bring out the real beauty of a tea piece unless you set it off against its own kind.’

‘You mean it was wrong of her to die? I was very bitter myself – I thought that no matter how she had been misunderstood, death could not be her answer. Death only cuts off understanding. No one can possibly forgive her.’

“Worrying oneself over the dead – was it in most cases a mistake, not unlike berating them? The dead did not press moral considerations upon the living.”

'But it only makes her death seem dirty, when we start feeling responsible and having regrets. Regrets and second thoughts only make the burden heavier for the one who has died.'

“She was not yet ready to return from the other world.”

'Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?'
'You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.'