Status Updates From Kitchen

“As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.” 42

“But if a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is.” 41

“There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.” 42

“The night was so deathly silent that I felt I could hear the sound of the stars moving across the heavens.” 39

“If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something… By doing that you come to understand your own limitations.” 41

“Am I losing my mind? I wondered. It was like being falling-down drunk: my body was independent of me. Before I knew it, tears were flooding out… I had a feeling that I wasn’t crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many.” 35

“The conversation we just had was like a glimpse of stars through a chink in a cloudy sky—perhaps, over time, talks like this would lead to love.” 30

“When I thought, now at last I won’t be torn between two places, I began to feel strangely shaky, close to tears.” 33

“The scratching of our pens mingled with the sound of raindrops beginning to fall in the transparent stillness of the evening.” 28

“Even I, slow as I am, finally understood his excessive unnaturalness… When I took a good look in his eyes, I understood.
He was terribly, terribly sad.” 29

“Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. I’ve always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being.”21
“I loved the Tanabes’ sofa as much as I loved their kitchen. I came to crave sleeping on it. Listening to the quiet breathing of the plants, sensing the night view through the curtains, I slept like a baby. There wasn’t anything more I wanted.I was happy.”22

“Her power was the brilliance of her charm and it had brought her to where she was now… That quality must have condemned her to an ice-cold loneliness.” 19

“When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own?” 21

“That sofa was delectable. It was so big, so soft, so deep, I felt that once I surrendered to it I’d never get up again.” 15

“Maybe all I had been hoping for was a bed in which to be able to stop thinking, just for a little while, about what happened before and what would happen in the future.” 16

“Hair that rustled like silk to her shoulders; the deep sparkle of her long, narrow eyes; well formed lips, a nose with a high, straight bridge—the whole of her gave off a marvelous light that seemed to vibrate with life force.” 11

“She made me want to be with her again. There was a warm light, like her afterimage, slowly glowing in my heart.” 12

“Suddenly, to see that that world was so large, the cosmos so black. The unbounded fascination of it, the unbounded loneliness… For the first time, these days, I was touching it with these hands, these eyes. I’ve been looking at the world half blind, I thought.” 10

“It made me warm to him; my heart welled up to the point of tears.” 11

“In the black gloom before my eyes (as it always is in cases of bewitchment), I saw a straight road leading from me to him. He seemed to glow with white light.” 7

“I walked, sloshing down the shiny wet path that glittered with the colors of the rainbow.” 8

“The fact that time continued to pass in the usual way in this apartment where I grew up, even though now I was here all alone, amazed me.” 4

“The hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness.” 5

“His smile was so bright as he stood in my doorway that I zoomed in for a closeup on his pupils. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I think I heard a spirit call my name.” 6