As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life – in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?

There’s no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan’s prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society – with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos.

I don’t think young people need to see the face of the deceased.

It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son A Personal Matter, I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our personal matter, and society.

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn't there? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.