According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.