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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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