Neighbours complaining about someone’s dog making an awful racket. You could hardly blame the poor beast, its owner had died in her bed at least a fortnight before and there hadn’t been much left of the old girl worth eating.

Morino: What does the kidnapper do with those things?

Yuka: Those things?

Morino: You know, the stinky things with four legs that make a lot of noise.

Did she mean the dogs?

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.

Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remember almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.

He was always eating things of hers. Clothing, books, family heirlooms.

Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.