It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.

When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two.

It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.

Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.