In The Miso Soup

There are six categories of bonno,

This was her first time abroad, and she decided that since it’s a foreign country they must have a different god and that maybe the god the Catholics pray to loses his power here because the customs are different, not to mention the land itself.”

made her wonder if people here never came up against the kind of suffering where you can’t do anything but turn to your god for help

The Americans, like the Spanish, massacred millions of Indians, but I don’t think it was out of malevolence so much as plain old ignorance

and you can’t do something you can’t visualize yourself doing. Normally we don’t notice it, but we always have to picture ourselves doing something before we can match the image with an action.

American kids—even down to the dark suntans and cornrows—and they can’t speak a word of English! But I guess they just like black people, huh?”

The foreigner’s enjoying himself, so maybe old Nippon isn’t so bad after all, in fact maybe this is a world-class bar, and we drink in places like this all the time, so maybe we’re happier than we realized, is how the reasoning goes.

but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s still such a thing as a perfectly respectable woman in this country.

ast, a man from Texas, had told me how astonished he was when he went to Shibuya. He said: “I thought I was in Harlem or someplace, all those kids walking around looking like black hip-hop artists, wearing their Walkmans, some had skateboards, too, but what was amazing was, here they are completely copying the fashions of African-

I took the coins, thinking: If he had change, why didn’t he pull it out at the photo booth?