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“One called me a monster of nature; another an incarnate devil; and another a creature made to be cursed in time and eternity. I retired from them and, winded my way southwards, comforting myself.”

“I desired to sleep; but it was for a deeper and longer sleep than that in which the senses were nightly steeped. I longed to be at rest and quiet, and close my eyes on the past and the future alike, as far as this frail life was concerned.”

"Dost thou not see that they tremble at thy presence, knowing that the avenger of blood is among them."

“I confess. But still I had hopes of forgiveness, because I never sinned from principle, but accident; and then I always tried to repent of these sins by the slump, for individually it was impossible; and, though not always successful in my endeavours, I could not help that, the grace of repentance being withheld from me, I regarded myself as in no degree accountable for the failure.”

"If I could repent me of all my sins, and shed tears of blood for them, still have I not a load of original transgression pressing on me that is enough to crush me to the lowest hell. I may be angry with my first parents for having sinned, but how I shall repent me of their sin is beyond what I am able to comprehend."

“His warrior's spirit reasserted itself in the face of necessity, but first love is something special, even to a man of iron will. He had violated all norms of morality and gratitude in his passionate devotion to her, and yet they were being forced apart almost as soon as they had begun to meet.”

“Probably the reason that he grew bashful when he looked at his wife's face was that, deep in his heart, he was embarrassed to be so hopelessly in love with her.”

“But occasionally, when a boy is placed in conducive surroundings and relives those feelings again and again, the secret pleasure will eat its way into his heart.”

My master told me: ‘Nothing is so strange as the heart of man.’

“The grand are sometimes base and the
brave sometimes weak; he who yesterday crushed a thousand foes on the battlefield is lashed today at home by the fiends of hell. The most graceful woman may show a ferocious temper; the most valiant warrior may suddenly turn into a beast.”

"Or was it her ghost," he thought, "her ghost yearning for love that came back to meet me? It was just as I remembered her and in an excess of grief, he began to weep.

"I yearned for you so deeply that my mother took pity on me and even traveled to your villa, always going to the edge of the veranda and never leaving your side. Yet, in the evening of the day before yesterday, you tried to beat her to death with a smoking pipe!

“If we are fated never to meet again this first pillow that we share tonight shall be our final parting.”

“I hate what's happened to me. I'm lost and I don't know where I'm going. What my heart wants it can't have... All I have left is a flame of longing for times gone by, for what I've lost. Growing old for nothing. I'm left with a terrible emptiness. What can life offer me but bitterness? Alone in my room... alone all through the nights... cut off from the world and from everyone in it by my own despair.”

“What he was experiencing now was genuine emotion. When he compared this to the various sentiments of love that had once occupied his imagination, he knew that this was something crude and blunt, violent and sinister, an emotion that was altogether far removed from elegance.
It was hardly the stuff that poems are made of. For the first time in his life, he accepted raw ugliness as indeed being part of him.”

Like pure water spurting from a cleft in a rock, words came out of this young man's mouth as the most natural and spontaneous he would ever utter: "However that may be, Satoko is mine."

“When he had stood watching Kiyoaki take
Satoko by the hand and run down through the shadows of the moonlit garden to the beach, he had felt that he too was sinning by helping them.
But if it was sin, it was also indescribably beautiful; a recurrent image of loveliness running away from him and disappearing.”

"And just as in the old wars, there will be casualties in the war of emotion, I think. It's the fate of our age, and you're one of our representatives. So what about it then? You're fully resolved to die in this new war, am I right?”Kiyoaki's only answer was a flickering smile.

“He drew comfort from the peace of mind that comes with loss. In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it. He had lost Satoko. If a candle has burned brilliantly but now stands alone in the dark with its flame extinguished, it need no longer fear that its substance will dissolve into hot wax. For the first time in his life, Kiyoaki came to realize the healing powers of solitude.”

He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance. The thought of dying suddenly spurred him with a desire to see Satoko, if only for a moment.

“To feel myself dissolve into your beauty and freeze to death in the snow - no fate could be sweeter.”

“He felt as if he were breathing in a new coffin of fresh white wood. Since early childhood, all that he had been taught to revere as honorable and beautiful was to be found, as far as the Matsugaes were concerned, in the proximity of death.”

“But now he caught sight of the profile of the woman in the aquamarine kimono and recognized Satoko. His fantasies were shattered. Why hadn't he recognized her earlier? Probably his whim that the beautiful girl should be a total stranger.”

“Princess Kasuga, however, was not much more than thirty. Beautiful, elegant, imposing, she was like a flower at its moment of perfection. At that moment, for the first time in his life, he was struck by the full force of womanly beauty - a dazzling burst of elegance that made his senses reel.”

“In a world where even a refined lady like that has to stoop to such schemes, maybe it's impossible to survive without having a dark side. Is it possible that morality in this world is like that game where a card counts against you unless you can push
it on someone else?”

“Who in the world is this person I sit here waiting for every day? What sort of person is it? Or is it even a person at all? I don't like people. Or, rather, I'm afraid of them.”

“I, for one, am no good. And yet, even as I say this, an obstinate sort of self-belief, deeply rooted in some dark, hidden corner of my heart, insists that at least there's one good thing about me.. And that only leaves me all the more confused about myself, trapped in this oppres-sive, intolerable state of mind.”

“But to die at one's own hand seems to me the greatest of sins, so I've decided to leave you instead and to begin living the sort of life I feel is correct. I'm sure the rest of the world sees nothing wrong with the way you've chosen to live, but the truth is, you scare me, and I simply can't go on like this.”

“The world goes dark around me, and I feel as if I've been plunged into a vision of Hell. From this moment on, I'm no longer the person I was. In fact, I'm no longer sure I'm a person at all.”