Fudoki

I will be thinking about this book for a long time...

Some of my favorite lines:

She was learning something about grief, that it begins with a great blow, but heals with a thousand tiny strokes.

“We are all dying,” he said. “We just forget that when nothing is trying to kill us.”Tales and memories, however inaccurate, are all we have. The things I have owned, the people I have loved—these are all just ink in notebooks that my mind stores in trunks and takes out when it is bored or lonely. It is necessary to keep track of things [...] It is the recording of things, in our memories if nowhere else, that makes them real.