Eguchi, now sixty-seven, had lost many friends and relations, but the memory of the girl was still young. Reduced now to three details, the baby’s wh… - Yasunari Kawabata

لا شيء أجمل من الوجه البارد لإمرأة شابة نائمة. أليس هو التعزية الكبرى التي يمكن أن يهبها العالم؟ حتى المرأة الأكثر جمالاً لا تقدر على إخفاء عمرها عندما تكون نائمة. أما الوجه الفتيّ فهو عذبٌ في حالة النوم، حتى ولو لم تكن صاحبته جميلة ص 86

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.

I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.