“The accountants who spent ten hours a day copying out numbers were, to my mind, victims sacrificed on the altar of a divinity wholly bereft of either greatness or mystery. These humble creatures were devoting their entire lives to a reality beyond their grasp. In days gone by they might have at least believed there was some purpose to their servitude. Now they no longer had any illusions. They were giving up their lives for nothing, and they knew it.Everyone knows that Japan has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. What surprised me was that suicides were not more common.”

“I glanced at the contents of what I was photocopying. They were the rules of the golf club of which Mister Saito was a member. I started to laugh.The next minute I felt more like crying, thinking about all the innocent trees that my superior was wasting to chastise me. I imagined the forests of the Japan of my childhood—maples, cedars, and ginkgoes—felled for the sole purpose of punishing a creature as insignificant as myself. I remembered, again, that Fubuki’s family name meant “forest.”

“Water beneath me, water above me, water in me--I was water. How appropriate that the one definition of the Japanese character for my name was "rain." I, too, was precious and copious, inoffensive and deadly, silent and raucous, joyous and despicable, live-giving and corrosive, pure and grasping, patient and insidious, musical and off-key--but more than any of that, and beyond all those things, I was invulnerable....From the heights and depths of my diluvian life, I knew that I was rain and rain was rapture. Some realised it would be best to accept me, let me overwhelm them, let me be who I was. There was no greater luxury than to fall to earth, in sprinkles or in buckets, lashing faces and drenching countryside, swelling sources and overflowing rivers, spoiling weddings and consecrating burials, the blesssing and curse of the skies.My rainy childhood thrived in Japan like a fish in water.Tired of my unending passion for my element, Nishio-san would finally call to me, "Out of the lake! You'll dissolve!"Too late. I had dissolved long before.”

“Honor sometimes means doing something very unwise. Behaving like an idiot is better than dishonor. To this day I blush for having chosen sensible restraint over common decency.”

“I don’t understand. She’s always been so friendly toward me.”“Yes, so long as your work consisted of updating calendars and photocopying golf club bylaws.”“But there was no danger of my taking her place!”“She was never afraid of that.”“Then why denounce me? Why would it upset her if I went to work for you?”“Miss Mori struggled for years to get the job she has now. She probably found it unbearable for you to get that sort of promotion after being with the company only ten weeks.”“I can’t believe it. That’s just so … mean.”“All I can say is that she suffered greatly during the first few years she was here.”“So she wants me to suffer the same fate? It’s too pathetic. I must talk to her.”“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”“Of course. How else are we going to work things out if we don’t talk?”“You just talked to Mister Omochi. Does it strike you that things have been worked out?”

“Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.”

“It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different.Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.”