If you ask what an Irish schoolgirl was doing reading Japanese literature in the 1970s then you cannot know what Ireland was like in the late 1970s. It was perhaps, as Shelley wrote and I transcribed on the green vinyl cover of my school folder (just above some Led Zeppelin lyrics), ‘the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow’. I knew that I wanted something foreign when I bought those books, or something that would tell me how to be foreign, which is to say how to be lonely in a more interesting way.
- Anne Enright (via)
