There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

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.

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

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

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

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.

If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.