Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be

[...] we drank each other up with so much yearning and need that afterward I felt myself drained of all the things the Chairman had taken from me, and yet filled with all that I had taken from him.

Aku tertidur nyenyak dan bermimpi aku sedang berada dalam bangket di Gion, bicara dengan seorang laki-laki tua yang menjelaskan kepadaku bahwa istrinya, yang dicintainya dengan amat mendalam, tidak benar-benar meninggal karena kenikmatan saat mereka bersama-sama masih hidup di dalam dirinya.