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

The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased.

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.

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.

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

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.