“This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...”

“A boy and a girl were insanely in love with each other,” my mother’s voice was saying. “They decided to become engaged. And that’s when presents are always exchanged.The boy was poor–his only worthwhile possession was a watch he’d inherited from his grandfather. Thinking about his sweetheart’s lovely hair, he decided to sell the watch in order to buy her a silver barrette.The girl had no money herself to buy him a present. She went to the shop of the most successful merchant in the town and sold him her hair. With the money, she bought a gold watchband for her lover.When they met on the day of the engagement party, she gave him the wristband for a watch he had sold, and he gave her the barrette for the hair she no longer had”

“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.”

“A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.”

“If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?”

“I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.”