"Nothing is good save the new… If anything of moment results—so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it."


"English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translations, every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translations, every allegedly great age is an age of translations, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer."


"Writing is difficult and 'strange,' insofar as its vision of reality is unlike our vision of reality. Some writing is so remote from us that it cannot be read at all—it repels us, or, on the contrary, seduces us. We pretend that this writing is the manifestation of a private vision, that it 'sees' a world, a reality, wholly different from our own. Nothing could be further from the truth. We sequester this writing, we call it exotic, or weird, or skewed, because otherwise we would be faced with the intolerable proposition that the reality such writing offers is, indeed, our own, but that we cannot, though we live in the middle of it, recognize it."


"We know that life is good for nothing."

Even Nihonbashi is quiet after midnight.

Now and again you catch the distant, ostentatious whine of a car engine speeding off down the expressway.

"What's up?"

I adjusted my grip on a receiver slippery with sweat, put my feet up on the table, and arched my back against the chair. It was Etsuko. She was in bed.

"See, I have this hankering to meet a bear. Did you ever see a bear make off with a fish?"

"Nope."

"Come on, you're got to try harder than that. Bears are great. They say bears can talk to people. You think that's true?"

"No idea."

"You claim you were born in Hokkaido, though. You really don't know?"

As Etsuko's voice came through the fine, vibrating steel membrane, I gazed at the row of blue-black hunting guns lined up behind the glass doors. Flat-chested, childlike Etsuko, with her gangly arms and legs-every time I held her tight, she felt as though she'd break against me. But when she took into her head to resist, she offered no hold anywhere-I might as well have been underwater, tangled in seaweed. What is this about bears? I murmured to myself. I was going to have to do something, and soon. But that was probably just what Etsuko had in mind. This business of wanting to meet a...