The train came out of the long border tunnel — and there was the snow country. The night had turned white. - Yasunari Kawabata

THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity". The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued: "I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity." Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five. In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.

Women are odd,” he said, to extricate himself. “Two or three of them have told me they’re sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I’d had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?” “Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions.

After all, only women are able really to love.