Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.
I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.
