Even though her pillow was perfectly designed and very expensive, sometimes she didn’t sleep at all. The trucks banged over the bridge to the harbor all night with a shattering thud. In the morning she’d walk in a kind of pleasant fog onto the red bridge, past the tall trees shimmering in the heat and the tracks and tracks of train lines onto the street where she waited politely with men and woman dressed in beautifully tailored suits, past the shop where she bought pots of flowers, up the street with two pastry shops and a noodle bar and a Nissan dealership to the school. Before the school was the canal, dark, just a trickle of water flowing past her. 

When she had her stroke it was so dark, like falling into a dark hole, and she only thought how frightening it would be to die, and then she thought of nothing at all, except her sons. She was sure she wasn’t dying if she wasn’t dead yet. It couldn’t have happened. There was her little dog, there was the telephone she held in her left hand. There was the clock and the window and the sun.

Minato Sketches, Sharon White, page 136. It’s hard to choose only one passage to quote from this richly woven, coming-of-age-again novel. Gigi goes to Japan alone, after a long illness, bargains with her losses, rediscovers her wild heart. Find it here.