Kenzaburō Ōe with Sanroku Yoshida (interview date 7 June 1986)

SOURCE: An interview in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 369-74.

[In the following interview, which was conducted in 1986, Ōe discusses such topics as his literary and cultural influences and the style and techniques of his fiction.]

[Yoshida]: I met with Yōtarō Konaka yesterday. He said that recently Japanese society has created a peculiar mood in which it is rather difficult to discuss matters antinuclear, and that one may be considered childish or immature if one is antinuclear. The major theme of your Flood unto My Soul (1973), The Pinchrunner (1976), and other works is the deracination of mankind by nuclear holocaust. As the author of these novels, do you agree with such an assessment of the social climate?

[Ōe]: I published a book called Hiroshima Notes (1965; Eng. 1981) twenty-three years ago. So it has been about a quarter of a century since I started to think about "Hiroshima." During that time, I have participated in the activities of a group called the Japan Confederation of A-Bomb and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations; I have written and spoken in public in support of such movements as "Abolishment of Nuclear Weapons" and "Relief for Victims"; I have organized committees and councils for these movements as well; yet I do not think things are particularly difficult today. Twenty-four or twenty-five years ago, they were difficult—oh, well, not really difficult, but I was not supported by the majority of Japanese intellectuals. Many victims talked at those meetings, and they wrote about their ordeals. Nevertheless, Japanese scholars, whether they were scholars of English literature, sociologists, physicists, or well-known writers, seldom paid serious attention to such things—except for a handful of fine scholars such as Kazuo Watanabe, Masao Maruyama, and Professor Shūichi Katō. The situation now is about the same.

Four or five years ago, when American medium-range nuclear missiles put Europe in a very precarious position, an antinuclear movement spread from Europe to the United States. When there are such fervid antinuclear movements in Europe and the United States, Japanese intellectuals tend to follow their lead. Therefore, we had a large-scale antinuclear movement in Japan at that time. Now very little is going on. I have not been influenced by these ups and downs of the movements. I do what I have to do in writing my novels and critical essays.

If Japanese critics say it is childish and naïve to oppose nuclear weapons, let me tell you the following: the American political scientist George Kennan, whose judgment I trust, argues in his book The Nuclear Delusion that political figures and nuclear weapons experts always ridicule antinuclear movements as manifestations of naïveté or childishness. However, it is the naïveté of the expert, in both diplomacy and nuclear weapons, that makes the existence of the world precarious. This is what George Kennan says, and I think this is also true in Japan. So there is no need to keep silent when you are called "childish." To be frank, I have to admit that there is perhaps something indeed quite childish about Japanese antinuclear movements. Nonetheless, one must try to embody one's ideals in one's works. If you don't do this, and you are called "childish," it is in part your own fault.

In your works, Mr. Ōe, there are many themes that had not been treated in Japanese literature before. When you started writing fiction, some readers were shocked because of your unique style, new themes, and new attitudes. I have been reading your works from the earliest ones to the most recent, and I know that your style is gradually changing. For example, in one of your earliest short stories, "Pigeon" (1958), there is this sentence: "A sudden anger ravaged my chest." This is obviously written in the syntax of European languages. Did you create this new style because the traditional Japanese styles could not handle the kind of themes that you wished to treat in your fiction?

First of all, the theme of nuclear deracination is not exactly new. Landing on the moon in a rocket is new. Of course, Edmond Rostand had his character talk about "The Journey to the Moon," and Wells wrote about the moon; but when man actually landed on the moon, that was completely new, and if you use that incident in literature, then you have an entirely new theme. The theme of nuclear deracination, however, is only partly new. The invention of nuclear fission made possible the atomic bomb, which killed many people, and nuclear weapons tend to intensify international tension. True, that is a new turn of events. But at the same time, as far as the notion of human annihilation is concerned, the theme is not new—it is partly in harmony with literary tradition (if I may use the word tradition as you used it). What I mean is that the notion of apocalypse in Christian tradition, for instance, or the Indian tradition of eschatology, or our tradition of Buddhist eschatology has been there for a long time. Therefore, I treat in my works the theme of the nuclear apocalypse as something partially rooted in a sort of global human tradition. It's not only me. The American author Bernard Malamud once wrote a novel, God's Grace (1982), in which he examines the problems of nuclear apocalypse in the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

In the period before I started writing, it was not in the tradition of Japanese literature to write novels in a way similar to that in which a philosopher or historian thinks. After the end of the war in 1945, for about ten years, post-war writers, under the influence of Dostoevsky, Hegel, Heidegger, or Sartre, wrote as the historian writes or the philosopher thinks or the social scientist analyzes. This was a new trend. I was influenced by these writers. I needed to think—think about Japanese society, the world, or about the human being—and when I started to write, I wrote in order to give novelistic expression to my thoughts. I was also reading French philosophers such as Sartre and Camus, so my writing was affected by them too, I suppose. I had an antipathy toward such people as Yasunari Kawabata or Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. I felt antagonistic toward established Japanese authors in general. First of all, they do not think logically. Their thoughts almost always become vague halfway. Furthermore, their thoughts are extremely simplistic. That's the way I thought about them when I was young; I do not necessarily think in the same way now.

I've been reading Kathleen Raine, a British literary critic and poet, who says the following about William Blake: "Blake's thoughts are full of ambiguities, but they are not vague." I thought Tanizaki, Kawabata, and other established writers were not ambiguous but vague…. Well, that's what I thought when I was young, anyway. As a rebellion, I tried to write as accurately as possible—for example, without using ellipsis. I tried not to omit any pronouns. As you know, the Japanese language is very effective when ellipsis is applied, but I was determined not to use it. Then my style became similar to that of a translation. By the way, most translations actually do not have any style. For example, Northrop Frye has been translated into Japanese, but the style is neither Frye's nor the translator's. You have to polish it up until it turns into a new style. I thought that kind of product—that is, something still in the process of translation—was interesting. A draft in which the two languages fight each other is provocative and full of resonance. So, my intention was to destroy the Japanese language by using a kind of syntax that cannot fit into Japanese. I was ambitious. I was writing novels with an extremely destructive intention.

In order to eliminate vagueness….

Yes, in order to eliminate vagueness, I even defined certain words each time I used them in my works. But that was only in the early works. For the past ten years or so, I have been trying to create a new, exemplary Japanese style based on those earlier destructive activities of mine.

Especially in the more recent works, your style is in perfect accord with the rhythms of Japanese speech, isn't it?

That's because I used to compose Japanese waka poems.

Oh! That explains it….

My brother is a waka poet. And I myself am more versed in classical Japanese literature than critics in general suspect. I am pretty good at haiku or waka. I composed quite a few waka between the ages of fifteen or sixteen and twenty, or thereabout. Still, I respect contemporary poets more than anybody else. I read a lot of modern Japanese poems. American poets like Auden and other foreign poets such as T. S. Eliot, Yeats, and Blake are very important to me. As you see, I am an avid reader of poetry, and I am interested in the rhythm of the Japanese language. I wrote Contemporary Games (1979) when I was forty-two or so. It is a kind of conclusion to all of my experimental novels. After that novel, for the past ten years, I've been trying to create yet another new style, a more comfortable one for Japanese; I don't mean to go back to the traditional style but to grope for a more acceptable one.

The role of Shōyō Tsubouchi (1859–1935), for example, was important in that he created a new style for new thoughts….

Yes, but the ambitions of men of letters in regard to their style are always ambiguous. Take Shōyō's style, for instance. The capacity of Shōyō's style for conveying meaning or expressing thought was not as great as that of Enchō Sanyūtei (1839–1900), a popular storyteller and entertainer who was Shōyō's contemporary. Therefore, when Shimei Futabatei (1864–1909), Shōyō's disciple, tried to develop a new style for his Drifting Clouds (1889), he studied Enchō's style instead of his teacher's. A writer's thoughts about his style, as is obvious from Shōyō's case, are legitimate only half the time. No matter what the result may be, however, writers have to strive for new thoughts and new styles, especially at the start of a new age. Like Shōyō and Futabatei at the turning point of Japanese history after the Meiji Restoration (1868), I also tried to create a new style under the impact of Japan's surrender in the second world war.

Your use of Gothic or black letters first appeared, I believe, in Our Age (1959). Later, in The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away (1969; Eng. 1977), The Flood unto My Soul, The Pinchrunner, and Contemporary Games, you use that technique profusely. In recent stories, however, you put in Gothics only the dialogue of a character called Eeyore. What is your purpose in doing so? When I first encountered this, I wondered if there were any pictorial meaning on that particular page with the black letters.

Well, any writer in any period or country is interested in typography. For example, Laurence Sterne, who wrote A Sentimental Journey, used dashes extensively in his novels. In Japan too, in the Meiji period when typography was introduced, writers tried out various interesting techniques. For example, the critic Chogyū Takayama (1871–1902) put little circles, double circles, dots, and lines around his sentences in order to make these sentences stand out. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin puts uneven spaces between letters by way of emphasis. This is a kind of defamiliarization in typography. I am very much interested in this sort of contrivance. It is possible to use various kinds of type at one time in order to make the pages more expressive. The Japanese language has three scripts: katakana, hiragana [two kinds of syllabaries], and kanji [Chinese characters], which we usually combine.

In The Pinchrunner some parts are all in katakana.

Yes,… and there is this interesting thing called rubi [the pronunciation key in one of the syllabaries of hard-to-read characters, usually given in small print beside the characters]. For example, if you write the kanji for "defamiliarization" and follow it with either the Russian or French equivalent in Japanese syllabic form as a rubi, then you can show in one space both the Japanese word and the foreign term from which the Japanese has originated. You can do the same thing using parentheses. You know, we have so many imported words in Japanese, and it is sometimes important to indicate the source. Thanks to the nature of the writing system, Japanese typography is very diversified. I consciously take advantage of this factor….

In Inter Ice Age 4 (1959; Eng. 1970) Kōbō Abe (b. 1924) filled several pages using only katakana. The translator of this work solved the problem by using capitals. If those works of yours are to be translated, some similar kind of device also has to be developed. How about Gothics or italics?

Yes, I like italics. Those boldface types in my works can be considered as italics in English.

The Pinchrunner is unique in that the style is interesting and different from that of other works. You must have invented this particular style to express the atmosphere of farce or slapstick. The major plot device in this work is the identity switch between father and son. How did you come up with such an interesting idea? Is there any particular work that you took as an example?

There is no particular source. I live with my handicapped son. Sometimes our roles somehow get reversed in our conversations—jokingly, of course. The identity switch such as the one between sexes is in the tradition of European grotesque realism as a form of theater, like harlequinades. One example would be Ferdydurke by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, in which an adult turns into a child. This is a novel that resembles mine, but it was not a source; I got the idea from my own life with my son. But, of course, I like this kind of novel.

I am also very much interested in slapstick. I like American slapstick movies. Among modern writers, Nathanael West, who wrote The Day of the Locust, is my favorite. Another example is A Cool Million. This is like an erotic gossip novel but is a slapstick. My interest in these works made me write The Pinchrunner.

The most important focal point in The Pinchrunner, however, is its narration by a half-crazed, eccentric man. The problem of narration is certainly very important in the modern novel.

You mean "The plural viewpoint," in which one narrator narrates and another person writes it down?

Yes, that's right. That was a major experiment for me.

You use that technique in various pieces. The most complicated one is….

The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away.

And "The Trial of Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs" (1980). This one is very interesting and has an extremely intricate narrative structure.

Critics completely ignored it.

They did? Completely?

Yes, absolutely.

Hmm. I wrote about it for an American journal.

Then that must be the only critical commentary on it in the entire world. (Laughter)

Anyway, the purpose of the plural viewpoint is to present reality with all its ambiguities and ambivalences.

Yes, you're right.

In Contemporary Games a variety of viewpoints allow the author to present many different images of one reality, which overlap each other. The same episodes told many times by different characters, slightly different each time, create an image that is blurred, just like a picture out of focus. I think this blurred image is intentional and perhaps important. Could you elaborate on this point?

I wrote a book entitled The Methods of the Novel (1978) in which I explained that the concept of ambiguity was very important for me. In the same sense of the word as in Kathleen Raine's comment about Blake, I wanted to present ambiguity in Contemporary Games—that is to say, one reality conveying many meanings. Since regional folklore or regional myths contain this element of ambiguity, I clearly intended to delve into this matter in the regional myths. Now it's been ten years since I finished that book. I recently finished another novel on the same subject. The title is simply M/T, whose initials stand for "matriarch" and "trickster." This is another Contemporary Games told in a straightforward narrative by a reminiscing hero.

These days literary critics talk abut "intertexts," which means the study of the relationship between two or more texts. I intend this recent novel of mine, M/T, to be read with such an intertextual connection between it and Contemporary Games. If you read both of them, you will understand both very well, even if you don't make out each by itself.

Then, the relationship is similar to that between Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs (1958) and "The Trial of Plucking Buds and Shooting Lambs," isn't it?

Yes, except here it is the other way round.

Before Hiroshima Notes and A Personal Matter (1964; Eng. 1968), I find in many of your works a motif of escape that reminds me of the biblical episode of Noah's ark. Did you have this in mind as the model when you were writing, for example, "A Cry" (1963) or The Flood unto My Soul?

No, I didn't. Even though I read the Bible a lot, I have not thought of Noah's ark very much. I read the Bible through William Blake or Dante, and I don't think either of them has much interest in the Noah story.

But The Flood unto My Soul has something to do with Jonah, doesn't it?

Yes, I think Jonah is an interesting person. He is angry and prejudiced against God.

Because he is trapped. His situation is a metaphorical presentation of man's entrapment; man's struggle to get out of his confinement points to the leitmotiv of escape in your works.

I have been enchanted by existential philosophies, and naturally I am a very existential author. My main interest has been in examining man's existential situations. Recently, however, I have been more interested in preexistential philosophies—that is to say, my subject matter is not so directly related to existential philosophies any longer. More concrete elements in life, such as how to live with a handicapped child or how to think about the unclear age, are more important to me now. These days I choose motifs from actual life. I started out very existential, and I still am fundamentally, but to a lesser degree.

The image of Africa is recurrent in your works. To be exact, the heroes in A Personal Matter, "Adventures in Everyday Life" (1964), and The Silent Cry (1967; Eng. 1974) all try to go to Africa.

And in Our Age (1959) too.

In all these novels the image of Africa is ambiguous: sometimes it represents freedom, at other times danger or even death. Mr. Ōe, have you been to Africa?

Strangely enough, I haven't. Africa is a very romantic subject. Also, since I like Conrad, it is a Conradian image for me. A lot of difficulties, full of sufferings, and yet romantic—that is Africa for me. Another thing is that when I was a student, I was (and, still am) very much interested in the independence movements of the Third World. Africa has been, for me, a fantasized romantic haven from the real world rather than a place with ontological significance. To me Africa is what India or other Asian countries are to Western authors.

You have seriously treated the theme of sexuality in various novels. In one essay you divided all of humanity into two groups: sexual beings and political beings. Sexual beings live in the shadow of the past and are therefore romantic, whereas political beings are always alert to the changes of the world and look forward to the future. There seem to be two major assumptions about sex: first, humans are incessantly vulnerable to the entrapment of sex; second, the sexual depravity that you often treat is a means of defamiliarization.

Yes, I think you are right. I have used sexuality in my novels as a means of defamiliarization and have attempted to attach various meanings to it. I am different from D. H. Lawrence in that Lawrence at one time treated sex as the central theme of his novels; I have simply utilized sexual elements as the most concrete means to defamiliarize the mundane lives of human beings. I did this especially when I was in my twenties and thirties.

Speaking of defamiliarization, many characters in The Flood unto My Soul, for example, are maimed: their hands are cut off, say. Some of them are very strangely shaped.

Yes,… deformed.

They are like those human figures in Picasso's cubist paintings or like the grotesque people in Hieronymus Bosch's pictures. The prime example in The Flood is the Shrinking Man, quite an astonishing invention.

They may resemble Picasso or Bosch, but my interest was in dealing with the possibilities of living together with such strange objects as amputated parts of the human body or deformed persons. I am still writing about this, hoping to discover that it is comfortable to live with those bizarre creatures. At the beginning, I did not intentionally draw difficult and ugly elements into my world, but as I was groping for methods of defamiliarization, they were there. So, yes, you are right. They are a means to defamiliarize the familiar. The Shrinking Man, the example you mentioned, the model for him was Yukio Mishima. I based the character on Mishima. Every time I saw him, I thought of him as a shrinking man.

Could you elaborate on that?

If you realize that the Shrinking Man is a caricature of Mishima, then you will find some new ways to interpret that novel. For example, in things like homosexuality and the desire to punish himself….

I see: you painted Yukio Mishima by using the technique of grotesque realism. In your essay titled "Why Do Human Beings Produce Literature?" (1975) you argue that, if anybody disrupts the fundamental harmony between human beings and their society, the world and the cosmos, literature, based on a humanistic viewpoint, will continue to protest against such violence. When you say "the fundamental harmony," I don't think you mean simply being friendly to each other.

In simple terms, literature should deal with the theme of the ostracized in family and in society. I have extended the theme of ostracism to include the cosmos. The question is how we can change the situation so that nobody is ostracized. That is to say, literature should create a model of the human being and his environment wherein nobody is discriminated against. This is the basis of my literature. The human being conceived by William Blake is not ostracized. The reason I read Blake and Dante is that I wish to see an image of the human being accepted in society and to enlarge my vision further so that I will be able to conceive the model human environment in a cosmic context. At this point the image of nuclear disaster comes in as an extremely disturbing element.

In the essay entitled "The Image System of Grotesque Realism" in your book The Methods of the Novel you emphasize the importance of grotesque realism. You say, "Our literature should adopt the image system of grotesque realism as its integral part and, in so doing, should bring about a real regeneration of human life—in this way I intend to formulate the future of Japanese literature."

Yes, that is my fundamental philosophy.

Yes, but in the cosmic context Japan is, of course, a part of the world. As a Japanese author, Mr. Ōe, do you ever write your novels for the sake of world readers?

When one of my pieces was translated into German, the German translator interviewed me. His last question was, "Is the German translation important to you?" I infuriated him by saying "No." I am not very enthusiastic either when a foreign publisher invites me to give a lecture on the occasion of a new publication of my translated work. The reason is that I am not optimistic that my books will find readers in foreign countries. Of course, I grew up under the influence of foreign literature. I have a profound sense of respect for the literatures of Germany, France, America, England, and Latin America as well. I am convinced, however, that literature should be written for people who live in the same country and in the same age as the author. Therefore, I never intentionally write for foreign readers. I strongly feel that I am writing for intellectuals living in this small country with me. If foreign readers happen to find the Japanese model of the human being and society presented in my works interesting, then I would simply be very happy.

With Yukio Mishima, it is a different story, I think. Even though he was very popular and was actually the king of the Japanese literati, Mishima could not trust Japanese criticism and turned to foreign readers. His death was a performance for the foreign audience, a very spectacular performance. The relationship between Mishima and the emperor system was rather dubious; the Japanese knew that. But from foreigners' point of view—say, an American reader's point of view—the Japanese emperor system is something inexplicable. Therefore, that final act by Mishima, tied in with the emperor system, appeared to be a kind of mystical thing. In actuality, he did it in order to entertain foreign readers.

I am always thinking of contemporary Japanese readers. That's why I sometimes get involved in antinuclear movements. If writers of the world became interested in the human models presented in my fiction, I would be very flattered. When I write, however, I only think of the Japanese audience. I am a local writer from the world's point of view. I read worldwide, though. I read Japanese novels, of course; but during the daytime, for about three hours every day, I read whatever I choose to study at the time: for example, Malcolm Lowry, Dante, Yeats, or Bakhtin. When I go to bed, since I quit drinking some time ago, I read Dickens by way of a nightcap. Reading foreign authors is the source of my nourishment. Nevertheless, insofar as I am writing in Japanese, I think I am writing for Japanese readers.

Kenzaburo Ōe with Kazuo Ishiguro (interview date 1991)

SOURCE: "Stronger Than Stereotype: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 30, 1994, p. 4.

[A Japanese-born English novelist and critic, Ishiguro received widespread critical acclaim for The Remains of the Day, which was awarded the 1989 Booker Prize for Fiction. In the following excerpt from an interview originally published in 1991, Ōe discusses the Western view of Japanese culture and his role as an international figure.]

[Ōe]: In my book The Silent Cry, I wrote about Shikoku. I was born and grew up in a mountain village on that island. When I was 18, I went to the University of Tokyo to study French literature. As a result, I found myself completely cut off from my village, both culturally and geographically. Around that time my grandmother died, and my mother was getting older. The legends and traditions and folklore of my village were being lost. Meanwhile, here I was in Tokyo, imagining and trying to remember those things. The act of trying to remember and the act of creating began to overlap. And that is the reason I began to write novels. I tried to write them using the methods of French literature that I had studied.

[Ishiguro]: One of the reasons I think The Silent Cry is such a special work is that it's often difficult for a writer to get a certain distance from very personal events in his life that have touched and disturbed him. This book seems to stem from such an event, but at the same time you seem to have kept control, to have maintained an artistic discipline, so that it actually becomes a work of art that has meaning for everybody. It's not simply about Mr. Oe. It strikes me that one of the ways in which you manage that is a certain kind of humor, a unique tone. It's very different from the kind of humor found in most of Western literature, which is mainly based on jokes. In your books, everything has a peculiar sense of humor that is always on the verge of tragedy—a very dark humor. This is one of the ways in which you seem to have been able to keep under control events that must be very close to you. But do you think this sort of humor is something unique to your own writing, or have you gotten it from a larger Japanese tradition?

I think that the problem of humor is a very important one. This is one of the points in which I differ from Yukio Mishima. Mishima was very strongly rooted in the traditions of Japanese literature, especially the traditions of the center—Tokyo or Kyoto—urban traditions. I come from a more peripheral tradition, that of a very provincial corner of the island of Shikoku. It's an extremely strange place, with a long history of maltreatment, out there beyond the reach of culture. I think my humor is the humor of the people who live in that place.

I would be quite interested to hear what you feel about Mishima. I'm often asked about Mishima in England—all the time, by journalists. They expect me to be an authority on Mishima because of my Japanese background. Mishima is very well known in England, and in the West generally, largely because of the way he died. But also I suspect that Mishima's image confirms certain stereotypical images of Japanese people for the West. Of course, committing seppuku [ritual suicide] is one of the clichés. He was politically very extreme. The problem is that the whole image of Mishima in the West hasn't helped people there form an intelligent approach to Japanese culture and Japanese people. It has perhaps helped people to remain locked in certain prejudices and very superficial, stereotypical images of what Japanese people are like. I wonder what you think about Mishima and the way he died, what that means for Japanese people, and what that means for a distinguished author such as yourself.

The observations you just made about the reception of Mishima in Europe are accurate. Mishima's entire life, certainly including his death by seppuku, was a kind of performance designed to present the image of an archetypal Japanese. Moreover, this image was not the kind that arises spontaneously from a Japanese mentality. It was the superficial image of a Japanese as seen from a European point of view a fantasy. Mishima acted out that image just as it was. He created himself exactly in accordance with it. That was the way he lived, and that was the way he died. Edward Said uses the word orientalism to refer to the impression held by Europeans of the Orient. He insists that orientalism is a view held by Europeans and has nothing to do with the people who actually live in the Orient. But Mishima thought the opposite. He said, in effect, "Your image of the Japanese is me." But what in fact happened is that Mishima presented a false image. As a result, the conception of Japanese people held by most Europeans has Mishima at one pole and people like Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, at the other pole. In my opinion, both poles are inaccurate.

I wonder, Mr. Oe, do you feel responsible for how Japanese people are perceived abroad? When you are writing your books, are you conscious of an international audience and of what the books will do to Western people's perceptions of Japan? Or do you not think about things like that?

I was interviewed once by a German television station. The interviewer had translated one of my books into German. He asked me whether it was very important to me to be translated into German. I said no, and a deathly silence fell over the studio. The reason I said no is simply that I write my books for Japanese readers rather than for foreigners. Moreover, the Japanese readers I have in mind are a limited group. The people I write for are people of my own generation, people who have had the same experiences as myself. So when I go abroad, or am translated abroad or criticized abroad, I feel rather indifferent about it. The responsibilities I feel are to Japanese readers, people who are living together with me in this environment.

Speaking as a reader, foreign literature is very important to me. William Blake is important to me. I've written one book based on Blake, and one based on Malcolm Lowry. Another book was about a Dante specialist who lives out in the country. So in that sense I have been much influenced by foreign literature. I read your books in English, for example. Naturally, I believe that a real novelist is international.

For some reason, Japanese writers tend to stay away from international writers' conferences. Up to now, at least, there have not been many authors who have gone abroad to speak out about Japan's place in the world, about the contradictions felt by Japanese writers in the midst of economic prosperity, about the things that trouble them deeply. So for my part I am trying to do that, little by little. Japan has many very capable businessmen and politicians, but as a novelist I want to speak out internationally about things that they never mention. And I think it is meaningful for writers from abroad, especially young writers like yourself, to come to Japan to look closely at this country and to meet Japanese intellectuals. I hope this will lead to a deeper understanding of things such as the difficult role played by Japanese intellectuals amid material prosperity, and to cultural encounters at a genuinely substantial level.