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.

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

The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.

From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.

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

There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn't there? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.

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