Quote collection
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"I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much."
"I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags."
"I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens."
"When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two."
"Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can't help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is."
"I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes."
"What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'."
"Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system."
"I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works."
"It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people."
"I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them."
"The best point of my novels, I think, is their humor. I want to keep many my works humorous."
"In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms."
"Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods."
"I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world."
"I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up"
"One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year."
"The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible."