But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.

It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.

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

Words themselves aren't that important. Even if somebody says words that shock you, or make you want to kill them, or make you tremble with emotion, the words themselves you tend to forget in time. Words are just tools we use to express or communicate something.

Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic ...