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

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

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.

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

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.

It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

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