“He started keeping a journal — had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.”

“When someone is force to realize that the road he'd been working hard to make progress on was no different from the place he'd started, and when he realized that he had in fact gone backward, all that person can do is face the pale sky and lament.”

“He had been diagnosed as suffering from atypical schizophrenia. Lord, how he hated that awful-sounding label. It conjured up visions of some deranged maniac escaped from a secure mental hospital.”

“He washed up on a desert island, where he incurred the most remarkable series of mishaps that somehow kept turning out for the best. He had no time to keep a journal. He was never rescued.”

“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original "intention" had have been.”

“...there are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself, and this was the greatest secret I had ever had to keep in my life so far.”