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.

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

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

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.