Lydia Minatoya

“Perhaps for many Japanese, autobiographical fiction writing is life. We are a people expected to complement, to harmonize, to anticipate one another's needs. All without a single spoken clue.And the reason is that he's in training to be a writer. Observing detail, understanding irony, interpreting motivation. Hiro knows that acts are symbolic. The hard sour fruit offered too soon in its season carries a message. He has made an error in the timing of his visit. He has inconvenienced that family.This is the Japanese way. Cogitating on inner meaning. Revealing ourselves and perceiving others through carefully crafted scenes. Writing our endless I-stories.”

“There's a reason why I tell this story. To me these Sunday painters represent myo—the strangeness of beauty—an idea that transcendence can be found in what's common and small. Rather than wishing for singularity and celebrity and genius (and growing all gloomy in its absence), these painters recognize the ordinariness of their talents and remain undaunted.It's the blessings in life, not in self, that they mean to express.And therein lies the transcendence. For as people pursue their plain, decent goals, as they whittle their crude flutes, paint their flat landscapes, make unexceptional love to their spouses—in their numbers across cultures and time, in their sheer tenacity as in the face of a random universe they perform their small acts of awareness and appreciation—there is a mysterious, strange beauty.”

“This was my ambition: to become a good wife and mother. Plus one improbable extra: [...] to find, deep inside, my own wiser self, to locate my own special future.I thought these were modest ambitions. They didn't seem too yawning or huge. But perhaps wanting what's essential and simple is the most extravagant wish of all.”