Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.

The worst... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion.

Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.