Life for Sale

To say human life had no meaning was the easy part. But Hanio was struck all over again by the huge amount of energy required to live a life filled with so much meaninglessness.

Why was nature so beautiful for no reason at all?

It's only the desire to live as long as possible that makes everything seem complicated and mysterious.

A dead body reminds me a bit of a bottle of whisky. If you drop the bottle and it cracks, what’s inside pours out. It’s only natural.

If he found himself penniless, suicide was always there as an option. Suicide... When his thoughts arrived at this point, he found himself overtaken by a kind of psychological malaise. No matter how you looked at it, he reflected, to kill yourself just because you've suffered some setback required too much effort. If you've finally managed to carve some time out for yourself and flop out, you're hardly in the mood to get up and fetch a cigarete that lies just beyond your reach. Sure, you're dying for a smoke, but it remains just outside your grasp. In fact, it requires a huge effort to heave yourself up and fetch that cigarette: just like when you're asked to push a car that has broken down. That, in a nutshell, is suicide.

Once the world has been transformed into something meaningful, some feel they can die without regret. Others feel that they exist in a world without meaning, so what's the point of living? But where do these two sets of feelings converge? For Hanio, both paths led to the same thing: death.

- Do you really hold your life so cheaply? - Yes.

It’s not so much the harming of people’s bodies I find objectionable, but of their hearts.

He was a man who had already died once. There was no reason why he should feel any sense of responsibility or attachment to the world. To him, it was nothing more than a sheet of newspaper covered in the scribblings of cockroaches.

Well, that's what they do on television. Every fifteen minutes, there are breaks for commercials. That way we get to look forward to what's coming next. That's how it works in real life too.

Beneath the sky, wretched lonliness was no jot better or worse than good fortune and success. To put it another way, wherever you stood, the same starry sky was peering down.

Hanio believed that his ideas were all rooted in meaninglessness and they blossomd into life at the very moment when meaning was created. For that reason, he never once initiated any action on the grounds that it was meaningful. People who ascribe meaning to their actions ended up staring meaninglessness in the face, in a state of frustration and hopelessness.

The odd thing is that only lonely people have a tendency to festoon their abodes with extravagant items.

Maybe the mouse had a misanthropic streak.

From that moment, death hung over him, snugly, the way snow caps a red postbox after a particularly heavy snowfall.

Don't ask things that don't concern you. After all, everybody has their own reasons.

People tend to be most terrified by the inexplicable. Fear seems to fade when a possible solution arises.

Out there, restless nocturnal life continued to pulse. At the bend of the road on a nearby hill, car horns sounded sharply in the spring night, as if leaping, like the flashing fins of flying fish, from a dark viscous ocean, Useless. Useless. Useless. Is there nothing to charm us? When ten million people come together. they voice not pleasantries but profound frustration [...] The insignificance of human life. Passion extinguished. The flavour of pleasure and anticipation lost, like gum when you chew it to death.

In short, if I had a choice, I guarantee I'd rather get a hole in the head than eat carrots.

[...] as he bit into the bun a crescent of yellow cream oozed out from the side likde the rising sun. For the first time in ages,Hanio had encountered something about human life that tickled him.

- [...] If you try anything, I might well have to exchange this toy pistol for a real one. I bet you wouldn't enjoy going to school with your stomach full of daylight! - If you pumped my stomach full of holes, I'd fit the holes with lenses so people could take a peep for ten yen a time. It'd be a good way of getting pocket money.

[...] a tired mouse-grey tie never works with an ash-grey suit.

The thought that his own life was about to cease cleansed his heart, the way peppermint cleanses the mouth.

She exuded the kind of glossy freshness one might find in a brand new tube of toothpaste just taken from its box, with its promise of a crisp morning.

Apparently the demented mouse also suffered from an eating disorder

So, who asked you to come?' 'Nobody.' '[...] So you're telling me that you rang the bell on the off-chance that a regular glamour-puss like me might be at home?' 'That just about sums it up.' 'You're a lucky man

No hay mayor seguridad que la de no saber hacia qué destino te dirigen tus pasos.

There he had been, putting all his effort into hurrying towards death. But here were a husband and wife in no hurry to die. A scattering of cherry-blossom petals, blown on the wind, lay in the garden. In the pleasant midday cool of a shaded room, the old man's white hand turned the pages of his Tang poetry book. These people were taking all the time in the world to weave together their own deaths, calmly, as if quietly knitting sweaters in preparation for the coming winter. Where did such tranquility come from?