As I began to settle down in my new home in Kyoto, I began, very slowly, to make my way in translation through some of the great works of Japanese literature. And as I did so, I was struck again and again by how much Japanese writing was touched by a decidedly feminine lilt and fragrance, a kind of delicacy and lyricism that I associated, however unfairly, with the female principle. This softness was apparent not just in the watercolour wistfulness of Japanese poems, but also in the very themes and moods that enveloped them — loneliness, abandonment, romance. This was perhaps, as much a reflection of my own tastes as in anything, and in men like Mishima and the modern-minded Abe and Õe, there were, of course, some towering exceptions. Yet seemed to me that much of Japanese writing, right down to such near contemporaries as Tanizaki and Kawabata, was devoted to the private world, a Jane Austen stage of domestic passions. The world of state, the striving of the office and the marketplace, the realm of public affairs — all these were scarcely glimpsed amidst the quiet, unworldly dreams of the soul. Even gangsters in their deaths, wrote poems to the seasons.