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.

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.

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

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.