There Was Surely Nothing To Indicate At

Every Country Should Have A Strong Literary Tradition Of Its Own At The Center, But It Should Also Have An Interest In Other Countries.

It Never Occurred To Me That Our Lives, Until Then So Closely Interwoven, Could Unravel And Separate Over A Thing Like That. But The Fact Was, I Suppose, There Were Powerful Tides Tugging Us Apart By Then, And It Only Needed Something Like That To Finish The Task. If We'd Understood That Back Then-who Knows?-maybe We'd Have Kept A Tighter Hold Of One Another.

I Do Not Think I Responded Immediately, For It Took Me A Moment Or Two To Fully Digest These Words Of Miss Kenton. Moreover, As You Might Appreciate, Their Implications Were Such As To Provoke A Certain Degree Of Sorrow Within Me. Indeed- Why Should I Not Admit It? - At That Moment, My Heart Was Breaking.

I Find Japanese Books Quite Baffling When I Read Them In Translation. It's Only With Haruki Murakami That I Find Japanse Fiction That I Can Understand And Relate To. He's A Very International Writer.

It Was Like When You Make A Move In Chess And Just As You Take Your Finger Off The Piece, You See The Mistake You've Made, And There's This Panic Because You Don't Know Yet The Scale Of Disaster You've Left Yourself Open To.