Top 70 Mieko Kawakami Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morning never comes, you sleep forever. That must be what death is like. When someone dies, they don’t even know they’re dead. Because they never see it happen, nobody ever really dies. This hit me like a sucker punch.”

— Mieko Kawakami

2. “I was so scared of being hurt that I’d done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I choose nothing. I did nothing.”

— Mieko Kawakami

3. “Listen, if there is a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it.”

— Mieko Kawakami

4. “When I start to feel emotional about something, I can’t tell if I’m actually feeling that way. What if it’s just something somebody wrote in a book? Or maybe a line or a performance from some movie... Either way, I get this feeling like I’m quoting somebody else’s work.”

— Mieko Kawakami

5. “When I was writing, I realized something. Your voice reminds me of a 6B. I’m not sure if this is going to make sense, but it’s like they’re soft and rigid at the same time. Almost unbreakable.”

— Mieko Kawakami

6. “Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”

— Mieko Kawakami

7. “I became unsure of how to leave the mirror, how to leave the me in the mirror behind.”

— Mieko Kawakami

8. “People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally.”

— Mieko Kawakami

9. “The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”

— Mieko Kawakami

10. “At first, suicide was just a word, a vague idea separate from reality. It pointed at a way that other people chose to die, people I didn’t even know. But once the word became my own, it took on the strangest shape. I could feel it growing deep inside of me. Suicide wasn’t something that happened to strangers. I could make it happen, if I wanted to.”

— Mieko Kawakami

11. “If anything has meaning, everything does. And if nothing has meaning, nothing does. That’s what I was saying. It’s all the same. You, me, we’re all free to interpret the world however we want. We see the world differently. It’s that simple.”

— Mieko Kawakami

12. “My life is nowhere but here, and I am nowhere else.”

— Mieko Kawakami

13. “Beauty meant that you were good. And being good meant being happy. Happiness can be defined all kinds of ways, but human beings, consciously or unconsciously, are always pulling for their own version of happiness. Even people who want to die see death as a kind of solace, and view ending their lives as the only way to make it there. Happiness is the base unit of consciousness, our single greatest motivator.”

— Mieko Kawakami

14. “You can make people believe whatever you want. You can fool them like it’s nothing. But you can’t fool yourself, not really. That’s why what matters is how you think about your work in your own lifetime, how much you respect it, how hard you’re trying. Or tried.”

— Mieko Kawakami

15. “Without school, I could get by without seeing anyone or being seen by anyone. It was like being a piece of furniture in a room that nobody uses. I can’t express how safe it felt never being seen.”

— Mieko Kawakami

16. “We’re all so small, and have such little time, unable to envision the majority of the world.”

— Mieko Kawakami

17. “If you make plenty of money but don’t have any kids, you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman.”

— Mieko Kawakami

18. “No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive?”

— Mieko Kawakami

19. “Weakness matters, she said. It has real meaning. I was silent, focused on her voice. But know what, she said, if weakness matters, then so does strength. And I don’t mean weak people using the idea of strength to justify their weakness.”

— Mieko Kawakami

20. “Memory’s funny, isn’t it? We remember some things out of nowhere, but so much of what happens, we never think about again.”

— Mieko Kawakami

21. “But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”

— Mieko Kawakami

22. “Everything that I could see was beautiful. I cried and cried, standing there, surrounded by that beauty, even though I wasn’t standing anywhere. I could hear the sound of my own tears. Everything was beautiful. Not that there was anyone to share it with, anyone to tell. Just the beauty.”

— Mieko Kawakami

23. “Night ended, morning came, and as I looked out on the blueness spreading into the corners of the sky, I thought about what he had told me, about all the light that was there and yet impossible to see.”

— Mieko Kawakami

24. “Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.”

— Mieko Kawakami

25. “When mom and Komi died, I never saw them again. They never visited me. This felt incredibly wrong, like an absurd injustice. For over twenty years, I hadn’t seen or heard from Mom or Komi because they died.”

— Mieko Kawakami

26. “You think about how other people feel. You’re so kind. It makes sense. Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”

— Mieko Kawakami

27. “Why does the night have to be so beautiful? As I walk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains.”

— Mieko Kawakami

28. “He used to tell me, ‘People are strange, Jun. They know nothing lasts forever, but still find time to laugh and cry and get upset, laboring over things and breaking things apart. I know it seems like none of it makes sense. But son, these things make life worth living. So don’t let anything get you down.”

— Mieko Kawakami

29. “I’d been on my own for ages, and I was convinced that there was no way I could be any more alone, but now I’d finally realized how alone I truly was. Despite the crowds of people, and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colors packed together, there was nothing here that I could reach out and touch.”

— Mieko Kawakami

30. “Light spilled off every surface. The light of day. I meditated on this phrase and stared into the radiance.”

— Mieko Kawakami

31. “Sometimes I felt like I had left myself behind.”

— Mieko Kawakami

32. “Aizawa was alive, or at least I thought he was, but if we never saw each other again, if I had seen him for the last time ever, in what sense was he alive?”

— Mieko Kawakami

33. “They don’t know how they make other people feel, and they’ve never stopped to think about other people’s pain.”

— Mieko Kawakami

34. “Even if something happens to us, even if we die and never have to deal with them again, the same thing will happen to someone, somewhere. The same thing. The weak always go through this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because the strong never go away. That’s why you want to pretend to be like them, isn’t it? You want to join them.”

— Mieko Kawakami

35. “It’s always about them. They’re only thinking about themselves. They never think about the kid being born. No one gives a damn how that child is going to feel. Isn’t that crazy? Once they’ve had a baby, most parents would do anything to shelter them from any form of pain or suffering. But here it is, the only way to actually keep your child from ever knowing pain. Don’t have them in the first place.”

— Mieko Kawakami

36. “My prejudice had biased my imagination.”

— Mieko Kawakami

37. “There was always someone somewhere discovering a different life, a different experience than the day before, stepping off into uncharted territory. But I wasn’t getting anywhere. I couldn’t move; in fact, I was being pulled away, slipping further every second from the blinding light of that reality.”

— Mieko Kawakami

38. “People are strange, Jun. They know nothing lasts forever, but still find time to laugh and cry and get upset, laboring over things and breaking things apart.”

— Mieko Kawakami

39. “People are willing to accept the pain and suffering of others, limitless amounts of it, as long as it helps them to keep on believing in whatever it is that they want to believe.”

— Mieko Kawakami

40. “If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.”

— Mieko Kawakami

41. “How many summers had I been alive? The obvious answer was as many summers as my age; but for some reason I felt the presence of another number, a different, realer number somewhere out there in the world. I thought about this as I gazed into the summer glare.”

— Mieko Kawakami

42. “If video games make you stupid, then what do mobile phones do to you?”

— Mieko Kawakami

43. “Why does the night have to be so beautiful?”

— Mieko Kawakami

44. “I’ve already had to deal with the hardest thing in the world. You know what that was? It was to try to meet someone who’s already disappeared.”

— Mieko Kawakami

45. “As I passed below the haloes of the green and red traffic signals, I was taken by this strange view of the evening, the city streets full of people – people waiting, the people they were waiting for, people out to eat together, people going somewhere together, people heading home together. I allowed my thoughts to settle on the brightness filling their hearts and lungs, squinting as I walked along and counted all the players of this game I would never play.”

— Mieko Kawakami

46. “Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

— Mieko Kawakami

47. “Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away.”

— Mieko Kawakami

48. “No, I shouted. I don’t want that kind of strength. I don’t want to be dragged into this, and I don’t want to drag anyone else down, either.”

— Mieko Kawakami

49. “Whatever it is I’ve had to live through, it’s nothing compared to being born.”

— Mieko Kawakami

50. “I thought about the books that I had looked through in the bookstore. It occurred to me that they were full of things that people wanted to say to other people, or things people wanted somebody to say to them.”

— Mieko Kawakami