Miyuki Miyabe

As long as there is happiness, there will be sadness. As long as there is fortune, there will be misfortune.__What__ real is something that not even the strength of the Goddess can change. The only one who can change it is me. If I don__ change my destiny, if I don__ cut through the obstacles in my path, then no matter where I go, I__l always be standing in the same place, doing the same thing over and over again, for the rest of my life.

I have friends like that__ery straightforward and responsible, good at what they do, good home life. But they get stressed, and they blow off steam by posting aggressive comments on the web. Their web personality is different from their real personality. They keep them separate. They just laugh and say it__ okay to write whatever you can__ say in the real world, no matter how critical or negative it is. That does seem to be one purpose of the Internet for a lot of people.__otaro nodded.__ut I think my friends are wrong. Their posts will never disappear. They think they__e just putting opinions out there. They don__ use real names. They say what they think. They assume no one pays attention for more than a few moments. That__ a big mistake.___ost of what goes on the net, stays on the net__omewhere.___hat__ not what I mean. No matter how carefully they choose their words, whatever they say, the words they use stay inside them. Everything is cumulative. Words don__ __isappear.___aybe they post a comment saying a certain actress should just die. They think they__e blown off steam by criticizing someone no one likes anyway. But those words___ hope she dies___tay inside the writer, along with the feeling that it__ acceptable to write things like that. All that negativity accumulates, and someday the weight of it will change the writer.__hat__ what words do. However they__e expressed, there__ no way people can separate their words from themselves. They can__ escape the influence of their own thoughts. They can divide their comments among different handles and successfully hide their identity, but they can__ hide from themselves. They know who they are. You can__ run from yourself.__om would say, __hat goes around, comes around.___o be careful, Kotaro. If the real world is stressing you out, deal with your stress in the real world, no matter how dumb you think it makes you look. Okay?

Above a certain size and level of prosperity, regional cities in Japan look alike. To discover what makes each one different, one has to sample the food and the sake, and stay long enough to see the patterns of life under the surface. Otherwise it can be hard to tell them apart. Wealth tends to smooth out the differences in the way people live. Life becomes standardized.Only in nature, in the mountains and valleys beyond the hand of man, are the real differences, the real uniqueness, preserved. There is something about the air in Hokkaido, a kind of richness that will never change. For better or worse, the only thing that really changes is people.

Failure and disillusionment are realities, but ideologies are made of dreams. And dreams, it would seem, do not fade easily.

All stories are the sin of their weaver.