Bird went out into the driveway alone. It wasn’t raining and the wind had died: the clouds sailing the sky were bright, dry. A brilliant morning had broken from the dawn’s cocoon of semidarkness, and the air had a good, first-days-of-summer smell that slackened every muscle in Bird’s body. A night softness had lingered in the hospital, and now the morning light, reflecting off the wet pavement and off the leafy trees, stabbed like icicles at Bird’s pampered eyes. Labouring into this light on his bike was like being poised on the edge of a diving board; Bird felt severed from the certainty of the ground, isolated. And he was as numb as stone, a weak insect on a scorpion’s sting. (Ōe, A Personal Matter (trans. John Nathan), ch. 2)

Forenoon: the most exhilarating hour of an early summer day. And a breeze that recalled elementary school excursions quickened the worms of tingling pleasure on Bird’s cheeks and earlobes, flushed from lack of sleep. The nerve cells in his skin, the farther they were from conscious restraint, the more thirstily they drank the sweetness of the season and the hour. Soon a sense of liberation rose to the surface of his consciousness. (ch. 3)