“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”

“I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”

“My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.”

“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”

“There. My ears are all dead. Now you try."Three times I repeated the movements she'd made. Slowly, carefully, but nothing left me with the impression that my ears had died. The wine was rapidly circulating through my system."I do believe that my ears aren't dying properly, " I said, disappointed.She shook her head. "That's okay. If your ears don't need to die, there's nothing wrong with them not dying.”

“sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.”

“Well, Mr Katagiri, I have not been frogging all these years for nothing. I keep my eye on the important things in life.”