Toward the end of 2010, I was on my motorcycle, riding to my hometown of Fukui, when I passed a woman who apparently had parked and gotten out of her car just to pull a dead animal to the edge of the road. My first thought was that she had hit the animal with her car and was trying to make up for what she had done to some extent. I thought that this was a kind act on her part even though she killed the animal.
I rode back to where she was to offer a hand and found her in a fuss. In our conversation, she told me that somebody else had hit the animal but that she couldn't bear the sight of it lying on the road dead, all alone.
Amid the tendency of many people to lose interest in just about everything except themselves, this woman, so full of remorse for a dead animal, had quite an impact on me.