• “I know this usage is not found in the dictionary, but Father uses it like a wild card, so to speak”
• Parecen asumir todos que es en la falta de corriente humanidad donde Eeyore pudiera un día ser una bestia; aunque las bestias que yo he visto eran casi todo humanidad.
• Leo a Ma-chan mortificándose ante la idea de su hermano envuelto en asaltos callejeros, y me doy cuenta de que existo sin siquiera el recuerdo de la angustia del riesgo físico. No puedo casi imaginar calles amenazantes, ni mucho menos la dimensión social de entender al extraño un potencial conflicto inminente. Desde aquí se me caricaturizan las historias de asaltos, peleas, y violaciones, ahora menos perversas y más performáticas, un teatro medieval.
• “What Father needs at such places of shelter is a lush growth of trees […] the Erman’s white birches in Kita-Karuizawa, the bougainvillea and flame trees in Mexico City, and now the live oaks and red-woods in California”
  • Rather chase a gentle breeze set my thoughts by taller trees ‘cause I can’t stay forever by my window
• “Father became despondent, for he had to admit failure”
• “And so I felt both sorry for and angry with Father. I possessed no concrete evidence on which to justify my presumptuous intrusion into his inner thoughts […] I was led to think this way by the various experiences I myself had gone through”
  • Every time I am faced with thinking in the mismatch between my interpretation of people and their actions, I first wonder how much negativity I am pouring on such interpretation. This is where negativity hits me harder, I am starting to feel; in assuming poor of the others.
• “[…] but the way he bitterly called him by name without using any honorific, sounded like he was calling down an archenemy or something.”
• “If the problem could see a solution in the form of a novel, K would be able to maintain a little distance to the problem itself, and then be able to cope with it”
  • I also am fully successful at processing myself only when art is on the mood for helping.
• Faith, Christian faith, is presented as a topic, hanging from references to a certain appearance on TV Oe had (would be great to find a translation, if real) and connecting to an apparently inability to exist faithless with a desire for closeness to the matters of the soul.
• Who is “H”? He appears both here and in Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! , dying of leukemia in a hospital and having critical conversations with Oe. I can’t find it.
• “As we climbed farther up into the higher regions, I realized that the colors were from persimmon patches. Patches, not orchards, is the word. Originally they were farmland, cleared during the postwar years for growing wheat, in the days of food shortages”
  • The geography, the land and its product as a reflection of society’s state, simply a pos-animalistic trace. The Japanese are the ones to better understand this.
• “The things children do change at a frightening pace, don’t you think, Ma-chan?”
  • Children as early-adopters of the new realities
• “When K-chan (Kenzaburo) was in middle school […] he was a science nut […]”
  • When, how and who jumps from science to the arts?
  • One is in a better position to play for matters of the soul when in peace with the deterministic nature of reality
• “The ideal teacher-student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher”
• Similar in structure to Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! , I’m feeling the connection between cultural references and personal anecdotes is softer and somehow weaker here.
• Stopped at page 120.