After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

To talk of prayer after admitting he professed no faith was, in my opinion, a breach of common courtesy. In this sense, he did make a social blunder, for which I think he well deserved some minor castigation.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

The writer's job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.