Malta Kano Character Analysis

I wish I had a scalpel. I’d cut it open and look inside. Not the corpse. . .the lump of death. I’m sure there must be something like that. Something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves. I want to take it out of a dead person and cut it open and look inside. I always wonder what it’s like. Maybe it's all hard, like toothpaste dried up inside the tube. That's it, don't you think? No, don't answer. It’s squishy on the outside, and the deeper you go inside, the harder it gets. I want to cut open the skin and take out the squishy stuff, use a scalpel and some kind of spatula to get through it, and the closer you get to the center, the harder the squishy stuff gets, until you reach this tiny core. It’s sooo tiny, like a tiny ball bearing, and really hard. It must be like that, don't you think?

But after all, Mr. Okada, when one is speaking of the essence of things, it often happens that one can only speak in generalities. Concrete things certainly do command attention, but they are often little more than trivia. Side trips. The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.

Some things I know, some things I don’t know. But you’d probably be better off not knowing, Lieutenant. It may be presumptuous of someone like me to say such big-sounding things to a college graduate like you, but a person's destiny is something you look back at after it's past, not something you see in advance. I have a certain amount of experience where these things are concerned. You don’t.

As I sat here looking at you […] I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it.

Whether by chance conjunction or not, the ‘wind-up bird’ was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin.

If it hadn’t been for you, I would have lost my mind long ago. I would have handed myself over, vacant, to someone else and fallen to a point beyond hope of recovery. My brother, Noboru Wataya, did exactly that to my sister many years ago, and she ended up killing herself. He defiled us both. Strictly speaking, he did not defile out bodies. What he did was even worse than that.

I wish I had a scalpel. I’d cut it open and look inside. Not the corpse. . .the lump of death. I’m sure there must be something like that. Something round and squishy, like a softball, with a hard little core of dead nerves. I want to take it out of a dead person and cut it open and look inside. I always wonder what it’s like. Maybe it's all hard, like toothpaste dried up inside the tube. That's it, don't you think? No, don't answer. It’s squishy on the outside, and the deeper you go inside, the harder it gets. I want to cut open the skin and take out the squishy stuff, use a scalpel and some kind of spatula to get through it, and the closer you get to the center, the harder the squishy stuff gets, until you reach this tiny core. It’s sooo tiny, like a tiny ball bearing, and really hard. It must be like that, don't you think?

But after all, Mr. Okada, when one is speaking of the essence of things, it often happens that one can only speak in generalities. Concrete things certainly do command attention, but they are often little more than trivia. Side trips. The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.

Some things I know, some things I don’t know. But you’d probably be better off not knowing, Lieutenant. It may be presumptuous of someone like me to say such big-sounding things to a college graduate like you, but a person's destiny is something you look back at after it's past, not something you see in advance. I have a certain amount of experience where these things are concerned. You don’t.

As I sat here looking at you […] I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it.

Whether by chance conjunction or not, the ‘wind-up bird’ was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inescapable ruin.

If it hadn’t been for you, I would have lost my mind long ago. I would have handed myself over, vacant, to someone else and fallen to a point beyond hope of recovery. My brother, Noboru Wataya, did exactly that to my sister many years ago, and she ended up killing herself. He defiled us both. Strictly speaking, he did not defile out bodies. What he did was even worse than that.