I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I kn….

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

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written..

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of th….

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped..

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

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

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

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 potent….

Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work..

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 pu….

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

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 destruct….

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 ….

I don't think young people need to see the face of the deceased..

In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations for….

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with socie….

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

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because….

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense ….