The Last Children of Tokyo

“Being able to see the end of anything gave him a tremendous sense of relief. As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die.”

“With children like this having children of their own, it was no wonder the world was full of children.”

“On his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself of always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar fora structure called «individuality».”

“Assuming he had knowledge and wealth to leave to his descendants was mere arrogance, Yoshiro now realized.”

“so as not to hurt the feelings of young people who wanted to work but simply weren't strong enough, "Labor Day" became "Being Alive is Enough Day.”

“Adults arrogantly talked about whether food tasted good or not, as if a gourmet sensibility put you in a superior class of people,”

“Now he longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar for a structure called "individuality”

“Poison often had no taste at all, so no matter how finely honed your palate, your taste buds weren’t going to save your life.”

“She's always hated good-byes and as she got older she hated them even more.”

“This life with his grandson was about all he could manage. And for that he needed to be flexible, in mind and body, with the courage to doubt what he had believed for over a century.”

“Unable to turn back the clock, they let themselves be turned.”

“Nothing is more frightening than a law that has never been enforced. When the authorities want to throw someone in jail, all they have to do is suddenly arrest him for breaking a law that no one has bothered to obey yet.”

“She said, "If we do get married, I probably won't be around much, if that's all right with you." Secretly relieved, he began to think that marriage to someone who was often absent might be bearable after all.”

“She got off at the train station, the final stop, but in the station saw neither signs nor people. She sat on a cold bench in the waiting room, listening. She was starting to wonder if this was really a station. Based on experience she’d assumed as much, but you couldn’t count on things being the way they’d always been. Perhaps this was no longer a station, and she simply hadn’t heard the news.”

“When Amana was about three years old, she'd taken her back to her parents' house. One day, while they were sitting face-to-face playing cat's cradle in the room with the grandfather clock, she saw capillaries growing out of their bodies like tiny branches. Slender as gossamer from a spider's web, they spread out along the walls and up to the ceiling, twining themselves around the grandfather clock. Quaking in fear, Marika stood up. Until then, she had never seriously thought about the history of that house. Generations of people whose names she didn't know, whom she'd never cared about, had been born and died there. The sweat of women forced to work like slaves drenched the walls; the pillars were splattered with the semen of masters of this house who had forced themselves on young servants. She smelled the cold sweat of a son who had strangled his bedridden father to get his inheritance. The walls and ceiling that had witnessed these atrocities glared down on her. The misery of married couples trickling down into the pipes connecting the toilet to the sewer. A mother who has chemically transformed her loneliness into ambition chokes her son, squeezing his slender neck between her sweaty thighs. A wife who never lets on what she knows about her husband's affairs mixes her own turds into his miso soup. That handsome arsonist seen loitering around the house might be a former employee, fired for no good reason. The umbilical cord binding the generations of a respectable old family is also a rope around the neck. And she had wanted to cut her ties to all these bloody forebearers, now taking such pleasure in sharing old family secrets... My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop.”