Pachinko

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.

—Charles Dickens

The peasants knew that a spoiled son did more harm to a family than a dead one, and they kept themselves from indulging him too much

It was as if a warm room had gotten cooler, but it was still the same room.

Some Koreans in Japan do not wish to be called Zainichi Korean because the term means literally “foreign resident staying

She felt angry with him for lying, but she felt grateful, too. She had loved him, and she could not bear the thought of him being gone from this life.

No one would have pegged him

home-cum-workshop

He read through Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austen, and Trollope, then moved on to the Continent to read through much of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, then fell in love with Tolstoy. His favorite was Goethe; he must have read The Sorrows of Young Werther at least half a dozen times.

The more she got to know this man, the more she realized that the man she’d loved as a girl was an idea she’d had of him—feelings without any verification.

My nuts are shriveling