I write to please myself—of course, that is a given. But beyond this reach for pleasure, I know that I write for my countrymen, that they may be lifted from apathy and ignorance. I write because of a compulsion to make something out of the nothing that is my own life.

Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.

The Japanese bureaucracy is unique. It is also very powerful, although it is now the object of so much criticism. Many of Japans brightest made it a pillar of strength and continuity.

November is auspicious in so many parts of the country: the rice harvest is already in, the weather starts to cool, and the festive glow which precedes Christmas has began to brighten the landscape.

Perhaps, this is what love has always been, whether it is for a woman of for a cause -- the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning willingness to lose everything, even if that loss is as something as precious as life itself.

We are shallow because we are mayabang, ego driven, and do not have the humility to understand that we are only human, much too human to mistake knowledge for wisdom.

Of course, we are all egoists. Egoism is so much a part of our humanity.