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

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

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.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

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

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