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When you're a model, you learn how to make the most of your assets - in my case, the smallish behind that is the legacy of my half-Japanese heritage.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

I've been missing Japanese literature so much of late.

Japanimation is a whole different art form.

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.