Top 90 Mieko Kawakami Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “In the cold December air, all the leaves, thousands upon thousands of them, flashed against the sky, drenched in gold. Every leaf rang with its own light, and all the light poured into me without end.”

— Mieko Kawakami

52. “Sadness and happiness are all experienced by someone else before us; we’re simply following their lead.”

— Mieko Kawakami

53. “Once you get your period, that means your body can fertilise sperm. And that means you can get pregnant. And then we get more people, thinking and eating and filling up the world. It’s overwhelming. I get little depressed just thinking about it.”

— Mieko Kawakami

54. “As I start home she waves at me and says, “Al Pacino!” I raise my hand and wave back and say, “Al Pacino!”

— Mieko Kawakami

55. “How many more times in my life would I sit back like this and find myself transfixed by the blue of the evening? Is this what it means to live and die alone? That you’ll always be in the same place, no matter where you are?”

— Mieko Kawakami

56. “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

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

— Mieko Kawakami

58. “Smells can remind you of all kinds of things. More than remind, they bypass your mind altogether, tingling in your palms and nose, triggering feelings before they even become feelings.”

— Mieko Kawakami

59. “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

60. “You’re betting that the child you bring into this will be at least as happy as you’ve been, at least as fortunate as you’ve been, or, at a minimum, that they’ll be able to say they’re happy they were born.”

— Mieko Kawakami

61. “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

62. “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

63. “It only took me a couple of hours to realise that she was a woman of talents beyond anything I could imagine – even though I was a stranger to such talents myself.”

— Mieko Kawakami

64. “How did I feel about Kojima? How come I never spoke to her at school or even attempted eye contact? Sure, I was scared of Ninomiya, but what exactly made me scared? Was I afraid of getting hurt? If that was it, if that was what was haunting me, why couldn’t I stand up to him? What does it mean to be hurt? When they bullied me and beat me up, why couldn’t I do anything but obey them? What does it mean to obey? Why was I scared? Why? What does it mean to be scared?”

— Mieko Kawakami

65. “This is our will. We let them do this. It’s almost like we chose this. That’s all the more reason why they can’t leave us alone. They’re so scared, so terrified, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.”

— Mieko Kawakami

66. “Behind my eyelids, I saw dancing patterns mix and break apart.”

— Mieko Kawakami

67. “I remembered how she wrote once about when you send someone a letter, how it’s out of your hands. It’s not yours anymore, even though you wrote it.”

— Mieko Kawakami

68. “There are all kinds of things in the world I don’t understand, but I really wanted to understand you.”

— Mieko Kawakami

69. “But there was this other thing she said that really stuck with me. Even when a woman dies, she can’t become a Buddha. Because women are supposedly dirty. A long time ago, all these important people wrote about how dirty women are, and why that’s bad. So, basically, to become a Buddha, you have to be reborn as a man first. What the hell is that?”

— Mieko Kawakami

70. “No man will ever understand the things that really matter to a woman. The pain. How much it hurts to be a woman. If you say that, though, people look at you like you’re throwing yourself a pity party. They’ll tell you how men have a lot of pain to deal with, too... but sure. Who said they didn’t? They’re alive, now, aren’t they? Of course they live with pain. The difference is, who’s putting them through that pain? How can they make it better? Who’s to blame for hurting all these men?”

— Mieko Kawakami

71. “She was alive, and seeing her like that infused me with a loneliness and indescribable longing.”

— Mieko Kawakami

72. “Sometimes you can’t see the scars. But there’s a lot of pain, I think.” After that, she was quiet.”

— Mieko Kawakami

73. “They say it’s different for me. That not everyone is as strong as I am, that most people are weak or whatever. But that’s not it. They aren’t weak. They’re dull. They don’t pick up on things. And I’m not strong. I’m honest.”

— Mieko Kawakami

74. “And, like, in that way, living with this weakness, accepting it completely, that’s the greatest strength in the whole world.”

— Mieko Kawakami

75. “Without love and trust, resentment is the only thing that’s left.”

— Mieko Kawakami

76. “I almost never feel like eveything’s okay, but just because most of my life feels wrong doesn’t mean that’s how I want it to be. There’s a part of me that doesn’t feel like anything is wrong or okay. Just normal. That’s the part of me I like, the normal part.”

— Mieko Kawakami

77. “When you were a kid, people probably told you that you would go to hell if you were bad, right? Well, guess what. There’s no hell. It’s all made up. They made it up. Nothing had any meaning, so they had to make some. The weak can’t handle reality. They can’t deal with the pain or sadness, let alone the obvious fact that nothing has any meaning.”

— Mieko Kawakami

78. “My conclusion is that when it comes to the face, emotions are seventy per cent from the eyebrows and thirty per cent from the mouth.”

— Mieko Kawakami

79. “People who don’t know what it’s like being poor are always like, ‘It’s okay to be poor, as long as you have love,’ but they don’t know what they’re saying.”

— Mieko Kawakami

80. “Something really painful happened to them. Something really, really sad. But know what? They made it though. That’s why they can live in perfect harmony. After everything, after all the pain, they made it here. It looks like a normal room, but it’s really Heaven.”

— Mieko Kawakami

81. “It’s not like I want people to hate me. I’m just not about to go out of my way to make them like me, either. Being liked is wonderful and all, but that’s not what life is about, you know?”

— Mieko Kawakami

82. “She grew more nervous every minute, filling like a cup set on the floor to catch a leak. Quiet as she was, I could feel her tensing up.”

— Mieko Kawakami

83. “So I’ve been eating eggs for my whole life. But today I learned that women have “ova,” as in “ovals,” which literally means eggs. How is it possible I knew about sperm first? That doesn’t seem fair.”

— Mieko Kawakami

84. “I had the lonely feeling that I was the only one around who didn’t know the rules.”

— Mieko Kawakami

85. “I felt something like a cross between heartache and reassurance.”

— Mieko Kawakami

86. “What did it mean for us to be friends? What was a friend supposed to do? I couldn’t bring myself to ask.”

— Mieko Kawakami

87. “The sleep was like as it had been cut out from a slab of clay, round and clean.”

— Mieko Kawakami

88. “A long time ago, all these important people wrote about how dirty women are, and why that’s bad.”

— Mieko Kawakami

89. “Whatever had been left of summer had disappeared; I was standing in the thick of autumn, and the light and the soil and the smells had been replenished with its cold, as if a silent rain had fallen when nobody was looking, chilling everything.”

— Mieko Kawakami

90. “I was impressed by the utter predictability of it all – of how things had turned out exactly the way they should have in a logical, orderly fashion.”

— Mieko Kawakami

91. “I knew that it was cruel to be so optimistic, but, in my solitude, I couldn’t resist the urge and spent entire days basking in idiotic fantasies, sometimes verging on prayer.”

— Mieko Kawakami

92. “What had come over me? The whole day I’d been running through old memories, getting lost in my own thoughts. But I guess that made sense. It was only natural. Despite Makiko being, in the present, my closest living relative, the bulk of our shared experiences were in the past, from another planet. In that sense, spending time with Makiko meant living in the past.”

— Mieko Kawakami

93. “As long as you’re living on this planet, you have to be serious about something, but it’s better to be serious about a limited number of things.”

— Mieko Kawakami

94. “My bag was like a private room I could take with me wherever I went.”

— Mieko Kawakami