Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.
I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
You know, people who almost - yeah, there's a slight reluctance there - but there's also an ambiguity. What are their morals? What is their code of living. What are they really doing here. And it is just interesting because it is never black or white.
These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what hap- pens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.
My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.
People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.
