To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.

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.

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.

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

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

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