Men Without Women

When I listen to this music I feel like I’m in a wide-open, empty place. It’s a vast space, with nothing to close it off. No walls, no ceiling. I don’t need to think, don’t need to say anything, or do anything. Just being there is enough. I close my eyes and give myself up to the beautiful strings. There’re no headaches, no sensitivity to cold, no periods, or ovulation. Everything is simply beautiful, peaceful, flowing. I can just be.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later. The only question was when.”

as I gaze at the cold water in the fountain, I think about this man. And I imagine what it means to be the loneliest man on earth. I already know what it is to be the second-loneliest man on earth. But I still don’t know what it is to be the loneliest.

My despair was deeper than any ocean that they might have crossed.

o me, it’s a kind of sickness. Thinking about it doesn’t do much good. The way my father walked out on my mother and me, my mother’s constant abuse—I blame the sickness for those things. There’s no logic involved. All I can do is accept what they did and try to get on with my life.”
“So then we’re all actors,” Kafuku said.
“Yes, I think that’s true. To a point, anyway.”

“It was slightly different from revenge,” Kafuku said. “I wasn’t able to forget what had taken place between them. I tried really hard. But I failed. The image of her in another man’s arms was stuck in my mind, as real as life. As if there was a demon with nowhere else to go clinging to a corner of the ceiling, eyes fastened on me. After my wife’s death, I expected the demon would disappear if I just waited long enough. But it didn’t. Instead its presence grew even stronger. I had to get rid of it. To do that I had to let go of my rage.”

“Being alive is a killer, if you think about it,” Misaki said.
Kafuku laughed. “That’s one way to see it.”

afuku, as was his habit, looked down at his right palm. It was that hand that had caressed my wife’s naked body, he thought.
Yet on this day, that thought did not suffocate him. Instead, his reaction was, yes, such things do happen. They do happen. After all, it’s just a matter of flesh and blood. No more than a pile of bone and ash in the end, right? There has to be something more important than that.

Kafuku said nothing, just looked straight into his eyes. This time Takatsuki met his gaze and held it for a long time. They could see a certain sparkle of recognition in each other’s eyes.

But the proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we love them. All it can do is cause us pain. Examining your own heart, however, is another matter. I think it’s possible to see what’s in there if you work hard enough at it. So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.