With suicide, it's a strange thing in Japanese culture. It's acceptable. My parents would have been devastated if my attempt had been successful, but they would have somehow accepted it.

When I think about my own work, there usually is one or the other light bulb moment where there is this flash of insight. Where do these ideas come from? Supernatural? Enigmatic? Divine? You can take that any way you like. I think the human mind does a lot of things that we could call somehow divine.

Amanda is now a tenure-track professor at Yale.