No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.

As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.

I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"

If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not consciously intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original intention had have been.