Natsuo Kirino Quotes

Friends are a weird thing. It seems like they know all about you, but then they don't understand you at all.

You have to be careful, Terauchi always warned us, or you'll wind up in some database. Then adults will control you.

I don't know if foreigners will take to my novels or not. It may be that my books appeal only to a particular gender or age group rather than convey a more universal appeal.

The woman had gasped beneath his heavy body. He rubbed against her, lubricated by the warm, sticky liquid, but as her body gradually grew cold, he felt as though they'd been glued together. She seemed to be see-sawing between agony and ecstasy, but finally Satake pressed his lips over hers to quiet the groans-of pain or pleasure-that were leaking from her mouth. He found the hole that he had made in her side and worked his finger deep into the opening. Blood was pumping from the wound, staining their sex a gruesome crimson. He wanted to get further inside, to melt into her. As he was about to come, he pulled his lips from her and she whispered in his ear: "I'm finished ... finished."
"I know," he'd said, and he could still hear the exact sound of his own voice.

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

I suppose I'm the one responsible for destroying myself.

Kazue's journals depict an absolutely sublime struggle, the struggle between an individual and the rest of the world. Kazue lost the battle, ended up completely alone, and died hungry for some measure of kindness from another person. Don't you think it's a sad story?

You see, natural beauty creates such excitement that the existence of the weight is negated. And once it is negated, the heavier it is to bear.

If the old man looked at straight lines to keep his act together, I was going to stare at curved lines and go down in flames.

If people can't stand being alone, they have no choice but to die

To live and imagine. That's the job left for those of us who've survived.

When high school girls like us freak out, people are always able to overpower us before we do something stupid, like hijacking a bus or running around with a knife. Which is why girls arm themselves beforehand so they don't get caught up in something like that. Boys probably aren't so good at protecting themselves.

Walk around Tokyo and all you see are people trying to sell you something. Tell them okay and before you know you have bought something. Make the mistake of telling your address and now you're on a mailing list. Some old guy pats you on the shoulder and before you know what hit you you're in a hotel room. Stalkers' victims, the ones they kill, are always women.

I got up on time this morning, boarded the train, changed to the subway, and worked like an aggressive career woman in one of the biggest corporations around. At night I transformed into a prostitute sought out by men. Suddenly I remembered the argument I had had earlier with Arai and stopped short. I'm a company employee day and night. Or is it that I'm a prostitute night and day? Which is it? Which one is me?

As a child I first became aware that my existence had a purpose when I realized men lusted after me. And that's why I will lust forever after men. Before I even began to worry about homework or any of those school things, I began having secret liaisons with men. And it is men who give me the proof I need now to feel I'm alive.

She couldn't live her life as someone's prisoner the way he had lived his, caught up in a dream of the past, with no way forward and no way back, forced to dig down inside oneself.

Our gods did not come to us in any specific form, but we held them in our hearts and understood them in our own way.

My father and mother fed my sister and me on a diet of romantic dreams just as though they were giving us candy. Gradually the dreams wore thin, until in the end they wasted away to nothing.

It seems in the final analysis that people who get involved in religion are only after their own personal happiness.

[..] and there are tons of people I hate so much that I wouldn't mind taking them out. But killing them wouldn't get me anywhere - that's the conclusion I always come to. If I'm going to pay for it in the end, I might as well let them live.

I'm still afraid of being totally honest. I'm more afraid of this than dying.

A women who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people's evaluations.

If you say I hide things because I'm shy, that can't be right. I've finally realized it's for a different reason
that I don't want to see the darkness that lies in my heart

I'm happy to be told that I am beautiful, but I don't gain anything from that.

Loneliness. Sometimes that awful feeling causes you to do something stupid.

One of my books, 'Rain Falling on My Face,' earned me the 39th Edogawa Ranpo prize. It's a very prestigious literary prize in Japan, mostly for mysteries and thrillers.

I first thought about becoming a writer after the age of 30, which is rather late, I'd say. In my 20s, I wasn't especially good at anything, and I didn't have a lot of experiences. I was just a young woman without a good job.

Men live by rules they've made for themselves. And among those rules is one specifying that women are merely commodities for men to possess. A daughter belongs to her father, a wife to her husband. A woman's own desires present obstacles for men and are best ignored.

It wasn't so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.

Here was a man who wanted what no one had wanted before: he wanted to get to know the inner workings of the doll-like woman who was me. Karl wasn't interested in me; neither was Johnson. But Kijima's father liked me for who I was. The realization left me feeling numb. I was touched. But being touched is not the same as feeling desire. And I didn't exist without desire. If I didn't exist, then what?

In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.

Izanami - over the long years that she had handed out death - had become a true goddess, and not just that: the quintessential destroyer […] she was the goddess who invited our desire and also our defilement; she bore the weight of the past and lived on into the future for ever. The realisation filled me with overwhelming awe.

You know," she murmured, "we're all heading straight to hell."
"Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look. "It's like riding downhill with no brakes."
"You mean, there's no way to stop?"
"No, you stop all right - when you crash.

[A] person's fate is determined by where he is born [...] I was, to be sure, brighter than the other children my age. I picked up reading and writing in no time at all. And I was able to calculate finances without any effort. To stretch myself and expand my knowledge, I wanted to continue my schooling and go on to higher-level classes. But my family was poor. They could only afford to send me to the village elementary school. When I realized that my dreams would never be realized, I suppose -- like a tree whose roots are stymied and twisted and not allowed to grow -- I began to nurture a dark jealousy in my heart, an ugly envy. I believed fate had determined that I would be born into this miserable existence.

The pain of being treated like a mere object. And a sense that this pain would turn into pleasure.

Most of the kids I know read only manga, but I prefer novels. Novels are closer to real life than manga, it's like they show you the real world with one layer peeled away, a reality you can't see otherwise.

For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.

This didn't make me sad exactly - it was more a feeling that my own world was too simple, too smooth, too boring and worthless. The most I could do was have another name, Ninna Hori.

I was in a self-induced depression. Welcome to me Real World.

The thing we are most proud of and the thing we are most ashamed of are but the front and back of the same coin. They torture and thrill all at once.

Fortunately for me, I ran across some girls I could get along with so I could enjoy high school life okay, but it must be awful for kids who don't get along with anybody. We're different from our parents, a completely different species from our teachers. And kids who are one grade apart you are in a different world altogether. In other words, we're basically surrounded by enemies and have to make it on our own.

And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself?

Bye-bye. I'm off on a journey to the real world. 'Cause within this meta-reality what's real is this - my death.

My lascivious blood leaves me no choice but to lust for men. No matter how common I become, how ugly, how old, as long as there is life in my body I will go on wanting men. That's just my fate. Even if men are no longer amazed when they see me, even if they no longer desire me, even if they belittle me, I have to sleep with them. No, I want to sleep with them. It's the retribution for a divinity that no one can sustain forever. I suppose you could say my 'power' was little more than sin.

But it did seem that the thing we are most proud of and the thing we are most ashamed of are but the front and back of the same coin.

For a nymphomaniac like myself, I suppose there could be no job more suitable than prostitution; it is my God-given destiny. No matter how violent a man might be, or how ugly, at the moment we're in the act I cannot help but love him. And what's more I'll grant his every wish, no matter how shameful. In fact, the more twisted my partner is, the more attracted I will be to him, because my ability to meet my lover's demands is the one way I can feel alive.
That is my virtue. It is also my biggest flaw. I can't deny a man. I'm like a vagina incarnate - female essence embodied. If I ever were to deny a man, I would stop being me.

I don't think I could blurt it out to Yuzan or Kirarin, though. They'd just say, "Hmm. You could be right," their eyes dreamily looking around for a bit, but then, as soon as the subject changed, they'd forget all about it. They'd drop it so fast I'd be left there feeling stupid and embarrassed. I'd hate that, so that's why I don't bring it up with them. It'd be like a lighthouse, where the spotlight rotates and, for an instant, illuminates something. But once the light moves on, everything melts back into the dark.