There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life

I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.