“Otoko went out on the veranda and kicked a cage of fireflies into the garden with her bare foot.
    All the fireflies seemed to glow at once. A greenish-white light was streaming out as the cage landed on a patch of moss. The sky was clouding at the end of a long summer day, and an evening haze had begun to hover faintly over the garden, but it was still daylight. It seemed unlikely that the fireflies could have glowed so brilliantly, perhaps she had only imagined the light streaming out of the cage, perhaps it had been conjured up by her own feelings. She stood there rigidly as if paralyzed and stared unblinkingly at the firefly cage lying on its side on the moss.”

—Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty & Sadness, translated by Howard Hibbett, 1975.