The book's finest scene, when Cambara is confirmed in her love as she cares for the seriously ill Bile, is one of disquieting tenderness.
His relationship with his mother was one of ferocious tenderness; as I read Bruni's description of her struggle with cancer, I was choked with tears.
Yes, there are weighty sociopolitical themes to be teased out of the story's tale of exile and forgetfulness, reward and banishment, but the dominant tone is one of painful tenderness – of the rapturous, bittersweet enchantment with nature that has underwritten so much of Studio Ghibli's output.
But James also noted an interesting phenomenon about Eliot's supposed ugliness: when she began to converse, her expression was one of such tenderness and sympathy that it left her interlocutor with an abiding sense of beauty.
We meet two friends, Marina Arianee Labed and Bellaa (Evangelia Randou), although their friendship is a spiky one, its patches of tenderness scarred with spitting and snarling.
The cover on the canonization ceremony program is the Byzantine Icon depiction of Holy Mother Mary holding baby Jesus in her arms with their cheeks touching and their hands holding one another, "Mother of Tenderness".
A total of 27 traits were examined, 19 relating to carcass quality, such as carcass weight and fatness, one mechanical measure of tenderness, and the remaining seven were sensory traits, such as flavour and tenderness, assessed by a taste panel.
And to make this day, this week, this month, and this new year, one of beauty and tenderness.
Let's make this day, this week, this month, and this whole year, one of compassion and tenderness.
This is a deeply affecting book, and despite its gritty prose, colourful language and hardboiled trappings, a tender one, its sustained undertow of tenderness and melancholy giving it a surprising delicacy.
