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

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

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.

When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

[...] 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.

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

that droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path of silk; and somehow came to rest there on the teeth of that dragon. I thought of the petals I’d thrown into the Kamo River shallows outside Mr. Arashino’s workshop, imagining they might find their way to the Chairman. It seemed to me that, somehow, perhaps they had.

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.