And now that saga is complete. End of story. True, much of humankind has yet to taste of freedom. Also true, this bloody century is filled with examples of the grail's being snatched away-witness, for example, the suffocating strictures under which women live in Afghanistan, or the spectacle of Chinese retirees being hauled to jail because they practice an eccentric form of calisthenics. In the battle for humanity's hearts and minds, freedom has won.
Freedom is everywhere.
We're awash in the stuff. He had had no use for his country's brutal campaign of conquest, but after the war he also rejected Japan's headlong embrace of the liberal West. In 1945, he vowed that from then on he would write only elegies. There was so much, there were so many, to mourn. The slim novel is one of modern literature's greatest, most poignant elegies.