The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

I don't tolerate you. I can't breathe when you're not here, I can't think, I can't write music properly, I spend my whole bloody life waiting for the post.

The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemeteries of dead wives.

Chivalry—Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it's a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups.

It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone.

I just hate Paris. I’m surprised more people don’t have some sort of allergic reaction.’ Thaniel decided to let it lie, whatever it was. ‘Only you could hate Paris.’ ‘Thaniel, I grew up bowing to immediate family. Every random Frenchman thinks that the only proper way to say hello is indecent assault. I thoroughly hate Paris.

She waited by the blackboard, trying to scrape up enough of her abysmal Japanese to ask what was going on. Lectures were always in English, which was just as well, because she had the linguistic capability of a sea cucumber. As far as she could tell, the word for ‘husband’ and the word for ‘prisoner’ were identical. Half the faculty were still worried that she’d got Baron Matsumoto locked away in her attic.

But he hadn't realized that grace is not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried.

Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time.

and that most international treaty problems would vanish overnight if everyone would just get over their snobbery long enough to sit down, have a cup of tea together, and recognise that they were all exactly the same person in slightly different hats.

Isn't that what impoverished young artists usually do with old millionaires who fall in love with them?

Calm,’ she said over him, full of patience, ‘the fuck down, and have your bloody tea like a normal person.

now he knew that if anyone said ‘it’s the principle of the thing’ then the correct response was to punch that person in the throat,

There are things it's hard to think in English. There's not a word. You can think them but you can't explain properly and the thought just fogs away because you can't call it anything.

For once he hadn't woken feeling like he was arranged around second-hand bones.

What you were saying about speaking. That's what music is for. Anyone can understand.

Trust them to find a piano and decide that the best way to play it is with a sledgehammer.

The monk thought about it, said he wouldn't be able to say Nathaniel in a million years and would he mind awfully if he just called him Natsu. Thaniel didn't mind. It meant summer, and he liked the idea that the man thought he was summery.

If someone had said he was dreaming, he would have clapped them on the shoulder and said yes, of course.

Thaniel couldn't think of anything less civilised than making a terrible noise at somebody until they answered you.

If it kills me it does, I don't need to call it by its first name.

There was something uniquely horrible about being told a thing about yourself you didn't know.

He sat bent towards the glass, wondering how a caterpillar recognizes its friends once it was a moth, or if a you had to start again as a moth and reintroduce yourself.

The chamber dissolved in a row where all the colours of everyone's voices clashed and mixed into an indistinguishable brown cloud. Thaniel looked down at his own shorthand. It was a bad idea to take an exact transcript of a fight. It looked crass if it got into dispatches. You were supposed to summarize, softly. He thought about translating it as the fall of Japanese modernism, which was overdramatic, and wrote, 'the gentlemen continue to disagree.

the correct response was to punch that person in the throat,

She stole Mori’s watch so that the chain made a fragile gold link between them.

I could kiss you,’ he said. ‘Prefer it if you didn’t,’ Tanaka said, and seemed to notice the steward for the first time. ‘Yeah, mate, no offence, but will you fuck off ?’ The steward, amazingly, did as he was told.

But he was exactly the same person, one who had just been allowed to put down a very heavy pack.

Thaniel didn't have the energy to point out that there were some guns you had to stick to, if you still wanted to be you.

Shame shuts you down, doesn't it.

You literally walked in front of a firing squad for us. We can take you to Tokyo.