"'Meat is the message'" (Chapter 1, The Sprouting Month, pg. 7.)

"I imagine Shonagon, the master thief, hiding in her nook of history, watching me slip in and out of darkened rooms and steal from people's lives" (Chapter 3, The Ever-Growing Month, pg. 33.)

"Now, in the third year of their marriage, he was stony with rage" Chapter 3, The Ever-Growing Month, pg. 47.)

"I had a lover in the Year of Meats" (Chapter 4, The Deutzia Month, pg. 51.)

"The modern Japanese housewife finds the human interaction necessary to purchase meat distasteful" (Chapter 5, The Rice-Sprouting Month, pg. 87.)

"You see, Christina Bukowsky was beautiful. Not beautiful in any ordinary, earthbound, Midwestern sense of the word, but transgressively so" (Chapter 6, The Water Month, pg. 137.)

"In racially homogeneous Japan, we were a radical couple" (Chapter 7, The Poem-Composing Month, pg. 152.)

"Maybe America had radicalized him, but it was Suzuki who convinced me that it would be fine to put...