Book: Snow Country.

If you turned the sad, tired existence of a self-professed, proudly cynical materialist upside down and shook it, something like love, and beings like angels, would fall out and come pouring down like dust. If you got so plastered at raucous parties every night of your life that you could cross the mountains of Jōshin'etsu Kōgen in winter a thousand thousand times and only think that it was the grass that was silver, you could know what it meant to love and be loved by someone, just because you understood her and she was there, no matter how cold your sober thoughts had become. If at the moment of your death, rash and impulsive and asinine, your cynical world could be turned right-side-up again, perhaps as the world fell out from under you love and angels could stay in this time.

That's Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari, a book that addresses the question of how people love when they don't know how--how people love when they escape a loveless cage. It's a bit of a 'cry and throw the book against the wall' sort of novel; I literally did that when I got to the end. But oh, it's so amazingly beautiful.