I'm sad to sense that she may be evaporating into obscurity, because she's enormously important as a writer and as an influence on other writers and other artists.

The Pirate Queen

Murakami's characters sense the potential liquification and destruction of everything. The aftershocks are psychological, and can be seen in characters who are some distance from the epicenter of the chaos in both time and space. The rifts, the fissures -- and those words are repeated often in the text -- are inside them now: there are separations and openings in their hearts, wounds and cracks in their psyches.

Gertrude Stein -- as a lesbian, a Jew, an exile (and) a woman -- was someone who was indomitable in her unwillingness to succumb to those marginalized identities.

They were celebrities, and if anyone thought it was strange that these two women who were so strange were a couple, they didn't say anything.

the deck of the ship which Grace captains, to the court of Queen Elizabeth I where the two remarkable women once met.