“…people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they’re going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they bother? Or even if they should bother, they’d probably just reckon, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later’. But we can’t wait till later. We’ve got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. And you, Mr. Wind-up Bird: you might starve to death. One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.”

— May Kasahara, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle