'Didn't you say your brother was driving a truck to Tokyo tomorrow?' I asked.

'Yeah - yeah, I guess I did.'

'Do you think he can give me a ride?'

'To Tokyo?'

'Right. To Tokyo.'

'What are you going to do there?'

'Suffer.'

'Huh? Suffer?'

'That's right. Suffer.'

---from Parade by Shuichi Yoshida

For awhile we gazed up at the sky.

'At times like this,' Satoru muttered, 'people tend to talk about childhood memories.'

'Is that what you want to do?'

'Not particularly.'

'Why not? This is the perfect moment, so you should go ahead.'

'I mean it's all made up anyway.'

---from Parade by Shuichi Yoshida

The counter and booths were packed with swarms of young men, like fruit at the peak of ripeness. Not a single one looked in my direction. That sense of freedom was as if, right now, in my shop, I were completely naked and the male customers in the store ignored me and instead went on and on about how one of their colleagues has a bottle of Givenchy Ultramarine cologne in his house...It was a strange sort of paradise where even the worst villain was welcome to come in.

On the application form to enter this accessible heaven, there's a part that asks for your gender. There's a part that says Male and Female, and beside that, there's a box you can check that simply says Person.

---from Parade by Shuichi Yoshida

Outside, the air was filled as ever with the noise and exhaust of passing vehicles, but the descent of darkness had taken the edge off the day's heat.

I threw my head back to study the building's southeast face. Every apartment had at least one window on this side. I could reasonably expect to see a light wherever someone was home.

Only a single window showed any light - my own, on the seventh floor. Every other window was completely black.

---from Strangers by Taichi Yamada

Among the fondest memories from my childhood was that of coming home from a long, hard-marching school excursion, throwing down the school bag my mother had made for me out of an old Imperial Army haversack, casting off my shirt and pants and socks, flopping down on the tatami in my underwear, and, utterly free of the need to keep up appearances or my guard, drifting drowily off to sleep as my mother went about her preparations in the kitchen.

...I could recall no such moments in all the years since my parents had died...the sense of complete security I had experienced as a child was something else.

---from Strangers by Taichi Yamada

into the body, into incarnation, from a state of dissociative algorithm where the performance and maintenance of a socially prescribed role which brings pleasure or pain only in reference to how successfully the algorithm has been executed, with what degree of elegance or wit or care, with how pleased others are with its performance, that it can be seen in their eyes, in their eyes, that is pleasure, your body is not your body, your body belongs to the order of things, the conservation of matter, subroutines collapse into folders neatly, to cascade forth again, a fan, a peacock's tail 5u39t4r76t283247321tr238pr37976tp9 y@%##$$ into being subject unto yourself, impacted earth surrounds the smoking crater of the fall, the silicate turned to broken pyramids of black glass, crumbling and shearing, jagged outcroppings like bedsheets hastily thrown over, the thing itself, a central mass hiving off in spores, tangles & extensions running thru and under and above the surfaces of things, rust: a condition that affects organic life, especially fruiting trees, itself alive, an infection within an infection, life hurts, life is hot, life is contagious, to enter into being, to pass away from being, to exist under the sun, under generation and decay, to endure the witness of time, the dying and the rising of the year, the hair that turns grey and then white, the wounds which scar and then fade only to unknit and unspool their contents in the end, a mold so fine and so white like a form of snow stable at room temperature aerosolized unseen, a flux, gathered in like a seam of fabric, expelled like the lovers from the garden, suffocated under its own increase, a withering condition, a wasting disease, sumptuous and overbearing, a drip, an itch, an opening that doesn't stop, becomes an entrance

---Nathaxnne

The crude oil that allows you to move through the world is controlled by an uncaring automaton invested only in the preservation of a hierarchy that has no use for you, and so you must kiss it better: crack the coded porcelain container of your suspended animation to scramble and coat yourself in a more becoming substance, one that warms you from within without – greased with the interchangeable interdependence of every pearl's un-insides, the oil that burns forever and ever. You can become something, different. We should change. We are allowed to. Utopia is infectious, merely to be alive, mutant, sensitized. Everybody's got to own their body. Everybody's got to own their story.

---Patty

I could feel the blood in my veins cloud with bubbles. You were lying. I got this feeling that I had to kill you, strangle you. I had to enact violence on you for lying or else I'd die. I wouldn't be able to keep on living. I'd burst. The bones in my ears were rattling, and my whole body began to resonate along with them. Waveforms crashing and spiking. I had to kill you before I died. And I had to ask you with murderous kindness, murderous righteousness, not to lie. The person who was killed, the body, the corpse, her dreams and hopes and future and passion, all life, I would stomp on it all, crush it, and kill you. Don't lie. I would scream. I needed to let you know. Your color is pink. Pink made from people's bodies ground to dust. It's this texture like my palms, my insides, all my pink parts, spit out. I know. I get it. You're just normal. It's a lie. I know. My opera glasses. I turned to look at you. Into your ears. At your brain. Your thoughts. The pink puddle of your mind. I turned to look into your real eyes.

---from Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate

I had probably always considered myself to be alive. If I hadn't, why would I have kept on doing all these things that led to me getting hurt and hurting others? After spending a little time apart from even a close friend, their very existence seemed to be uncertain. A musician I loved died. I felt myself listening to their music as though it was more precious than before their death, and that made me feel so sick I got scared. Value realised through loss cannot be true value. Still, there are things I only realize after losing something. I have no choice but to go on living this life through approximations, without knowing it all, missing the point again and again. I doubt myself because I say so easily that life is precious. I have no choice but to doubt myself.

---from Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate

I could see the sun setting through the window. It looked like the town was in flames.

"It kind of looks like a fire, doesn't it?" Watase whispered, just as the thought crossed my mind. I couldn't say anything in reply. What would Morishita have said? "They say that at the age of seventeen, you either become a star or a beast, It was in my English reading for today." Watase's profile reflected the fiery light. "It said you stop being human and become either a star or a beast for awhile. Adults really say terrible things, don't they?"

---from Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate

Asakawa's survey had included questions like this:

Tell me about your dreams for the future.

Calmly, Ryuji had replied: "While viewing the extinction of the human race from the top of a hill, I would dig a hole in the earth and ejaculate into it over and over."

---from Ring by Koji Suzuki

"Don't you find it fascinating, Asakawa? The idea that genes could escape from our cells and become another live form? Maybe all opposites were originally identical. Even light and darkness - before the big bang they were living together in peace, with no contradiction. God and the Devil, too. All the Devil is is a god who fell from grace - they're the same thing, originally. Male and female? It used to be that all living things were hermaphroditic, like worms or slugs, with both female and male sex organs. Don't you think that's the ultimate symbol of power and beauty?"

---from Ring by Koji Suzuki

The life I was living was no different from that of a middle aged man. I went to work and then I went home. I existed solely to carry home a paycheck. Whatever I earned was turned immediately into houshold expenses...If I took off somewhere and never returned, my mother - who had already used most of the savings - would be completely at a loss. I couldn't run away. I would have to continue looking after my mother until she finally died. Weren't my responsibilities exactly like those faced by men? I was only twenty-five years old at that point, yet I was already shouldering the weight of a family. I am forever a child with a paycheck.

But men have secret pleasures that they are able to enjoy. They slip off with their buddies for drinks, they play around with women, and they enjoy all kinds of intrigues on the side. I had nothing outside of work...I had no friends in the firm...I was so overcome with loneliness and despair that I came to a halt right there on the streets of the Ginza and started to cry. The insects writhed.

---from Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

"[Y]ou know, when you really think about it, modern science hasn't managed to come up with answers to any of the most basic questions. How did life first appear on earth? How does evolution work? Is it a series of random events, or does it have a set teleological direction? There are all kinds of theories, but we haven't been able to prove one of them. The structure of the atom is not a miniature of the solar system, it's something much more difficult to grasp, full of what you might call latent power. And when we try to observe the subatomic world, we find that the mind of the observer comes into play in subtle ways. The mind, my friend! The very same mind which, ever since Descartes, proponents of the mechanistic view of the universe considered subordinate to the body-machine. And now we find that the mind influences observed results. So I give up. Nothing surprises me. I'm prepared to accept anything that happens in this world."

---from Spiral by Koji Suzuki