* Toward the end of his book he writes: “Earlier, I talked about the poverty of real content in Japanese life, and argued that the novel as a middle-class art form demands more richness and variety in experience than is normally supplied the writer in Japan. I also talked about the underdevelopment of character in Japanese fiction, and how it is rooted in the Japanese hostility toward personality. The Japanese writer must somehow hammer out a personality for himself which he essentially must hide from view since he is not encouraged to express it; and he must fabricate lives in fiction which neither he nor his reader really know at firsthand and which thus lack the authenticity demanded by the novel.” (p. 178)