"I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread, and you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. You come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me, and I say I don't want it anymore and throw it out of the window. That's what I'm looking for."

"I'm not sure that has anything to do with love," I said with amazement.

"It does," she said. "You just don't know it. There are times in a girl's life when things like that are incredibly important."

"Things like throwing strawberry shortbread out of the window?"

"Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologise to me. 'Now I see, Midori. What a fool I've been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortbread. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I'll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?"

"So then what?"

"So then I'd give him all the love that he deserves for what he's done."

"Sounds crazy to me."

"Well, to me, that's what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though. For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn't begin at all."

- Haruki Murakami