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　I do not expect a friend a hundred years later.
　Public taste often fails in all fairness, let alone in today's aesthetic. History has told us that even the Athenian in the Periclean Age or the Florentine in Renaissance were quite far from being the ideal audience. As people in the past and the present have indicated, the future generations will still be the same; unfortunately, I have no doubt that the public after a hundred years would be unable to tell a grain of gold from mounds of sand.
　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 kn…