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

As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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

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 people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.

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.