Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

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.

And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.

Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.

If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.

I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.

But really, would Yoroido seem any less exotic if I went back there again? As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if Mr. Tanaka hadn't torn me away from my tipsy house. But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

I wasn’t thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he’d taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for... well,for something I’m not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.