Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.

Everything just blows me away.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.