ABSTRACT
When I was little, I was determined to do many things. At times, I wanted to become a scientist, at other times, a politician; after seeing a Japanese movie about the war in the Pacific, for a while I even secretly wanted to become a soldier—to rise to become an omnipotent military leader like Yamamoto Isoroku. All kinds of aspirations lingered in my tiny mind, but of all things I never thought that I would subsequently become a "writer." In fact, at the time, my writing was very poor; I often got a B or less. Moreover, in my childish notions I assumed that "writers" were people who could tell stories like the one about Snow White; they weren't so special. My grandfather and every other uneducated person his age could tell stories, and I'd never looked up to them, for among them were swineherds, pork butchers, undertakers, and so forth.
