In my reviews of three years past, I evoked classical Love as well as a modern dystopia starting my tour in Japan and returning there via New York and Germany. Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo centres on a doomed love in Tōkyō of the 1920s. About 30 years later and thousands of miles east, the famous protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote frequents well-to-do circles to find a husband to give her the happiness and glamour that she yearns for. In futuristic Germany of The Method by Juli Zeh, on the other hand, a woman who lost her brother finds herself prosecuted by a relentless State for letting herself go. The protagonist of The Changeling by Ōe Kenzaburō, the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, takes to imaginary conversations with his late youth friend and brother-in-law on the other side with the help of tapes.