Start her talking, and she'd go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn't get along with - most people in the world, in other words - she barely opened her mouth. Sumire was a hopeless romantic, set in her ways - a bit innocent, to put a nice spin on it. I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalisation, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection. Staying there any longer, she concluded, was a waste of time.

Unsurprisingly, then, just before her junior year, she just up and quit. She found the college totally out of touch, a lukewarm, dispirited place, and she loathed it - and found her fellow students (which would include me, I'm afraid) hopelessly dull, second-rate specimens. Nothing could come between her and her faith in literature.Īfter she graduated from a public high school in Kanagawa Prefecture, she entered the liberal arts department of a cozy little private college in Tokyo. Her resolve was a regular Rock of Gibraltar. No matter how many choices life might bring her way, it was novelist or nothing. Almost.Īt the time, Sumire - Violet in Japanese - was struggling to become a writer. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire.

In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. In the spring of her 22nd year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

Sumire sputnik sweetheart