Even if the public was to be ideal, absolute beauty is impossible in the world of art. Now my eye is just today's eye, not tomorrow's eye; my eye is a Japanese one, nor a Western one. Thus, why should I believe in the beautifulness beyond time and place? Although Dante's inferno can make Eastern children frightened, a deep mist of six hundred years has lain between the medieval Italian fire and our present Japan.
Indeed, I am just an ordinary writer. Granted that future readers have fair judgment and that beauty is universal, my works will never be selected as classics. It is beyond all question that I do not expect a friend a hundred years later.
Sometimes I imagine that people will not know me at all after twenty, fifty, or one hundred years; when a piece of my works will be waiting for readers in vain, fully covered in dust at the corner of a shelf in a used-book store; nay, perhaps when the only existing copy may be too worn and damaged to be readable at a closed stack of a library. But...