Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.

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.

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos.

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.

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.

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.