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

In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world.

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

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.

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

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