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

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

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

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

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.

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.