Then, after I had written the first three chapters of this volume, I was at the checkout stand at the News and Novels bookstore in Greensboro, North Carolina, when I saw on a point-of-purchase display a lone copy of a small book called Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. The author: Kenzaburo Oe. I had not looked for him, but he had found me. I bought the book; I took it home.

It sat unopened by my bed for two days. Then came the insomniac night when I was about to begin writing chapter four, the chapter in which Wang-mu and Peter first come in contact with the Japanese culture of the planet Divine Wind (primarily in a city I named Nagoya because that was the Japanese city where my brother Russell served his Mormon mission back in the seventies). I saw Oe's book and picked it up, opened it and began to read the first page. Oe speaks at first of his longtime relationship with Scandinavia, having read, as a child, translations (or, rather, Japanese retellings) of a series of Scandinavian stories about a character named Nils.

I stopped reading at once, for I had never thought of any similarity between Scandinavia and Japan before. But at the very suggestion, I at once realized that Japan and Scandinavia were both Edge peoples. They came into the civilized world in the shadow (or is it dazzled by the brilliance?) of a dominant culture.

I thought of other Edge peoples -- the Arabs, who found an ideology that gave them the power to sweep through the culturally overwhelming Roman world; the Mongols, who united long enough to conquer and then be swallowed up by China; the Turks, who plunged from the edge of the Muslim world to the heart of it, and then toppled the last vestige of the Roman world as well, and yet sank back into again becoming Edge people in the shadow of Europe. All these Edge nations, even when they ruled the very civilizations in whose shadow they had once huddled, were never able to shake off their sense of not-belonging, their fear that their culture was irredeemably inferior and secondary. The result was that they were at once too aggressive and overextended themselves, growing beyond boundaries they could consolidate and hold; and too diffident, surrendering everything that really was powerful and fresh in their culture while retaining only the outward trappings of independence. The Manchu rulers of China, for instance, pretended to remain apart from the people they ruled, determined not to be swallowed up in the all-devouring maw of Chinese culture, but the result was not the dominance of the Manchu, but their inevitable marginalization.

True Center nations have been few in history. Egypt was one, and remained a Center nation until it was conquered by Alexander; even then, it kept a measure of its Centerness until the powerful idea of Islam swept over it. Mesopotamia might have been one, for a time, but unlike Egypt, Mesopotamian cities could not unite enough to control their hinterland. The result was they were swept over and ruled by their Edge nations again and again. The Centerness of Mesopotamia still gave it the power to swallow up its conquerors culturally for many years, until finally it became a peripheral province handed back and forth between Rome and Parthia. As with Egypt, its Center role was finally shattered by Islam.

China came later to its place as a Center nation, but it has been astonishingly successful. It was a long and bloody road to unity, but once achieved that unity remained, culturally if not politically. The rulers of China, like the rulers of Egypt, reached out to control the hinterland, but, again like Egypt, rarely attempted and never succeeded in establishing long-term rule over genuinely foreign nations.

Filled with this idea, and others that grew out of it, I conceived of a conversation between Wang-mu and Peter in which Wang-mu told him of her idea of Center and Edge nations. I went to my computer and wrote notes about this idea, which included the following passage:

Center People are not afraid of losing their identity. They take it for granted that all people want to be like them, that they are the highest civilization and all else is poor imitation or transient mistakes. The arrogance, oddly enough, leads to a simple humility -- they do not strut or brag or throw their weight around because they have no need to prove their superiority. They transform only gradually, and only by pretending that they are not changing at all.

Edge People, on the other hand, know they are not the highest civilization. Sometimes they raid and steal and stay to rule -- Vikings, Mongols, Turks, Arabs -- and sometimes they go through radical transformations in order to compete -- Greeks, Romans, Japanese -- and sometimes they simply remain shamed backwaters. But when they are on the rise, they are insufferable because they are unsure of their worth and must therefore brag and show off and prove themselves again and again -- until at last they feel themselves to be a Center People. Unfortunately, that very complacency destroys them, because they are not Center People and feeling doesn't make it so. Triumphant Edge People don't endure, like Egypt or China, they fade, as the Arabs did, and the Turks, and the Vikings, and the Mongols after their victories.

The Japanese have made themselves permanent Edge People.

I also speculated about America, which was composed of refugees from the Edge, but which nevertheless behaved like a Center nation, controlling (brutally) its hinterland, but only briefly flirting with empire, content instead to be the center of the world. America had, for a time at least, the same arrogance as the Chinese -- the assumption that the rest of the world wants to be like us. And I wondered if, as with Islam, a powerful idea had made an Edge nation into a Center nation. Just as the Arabs themselves lost control of the new Islamic Center, which was ruled by Turks, so also the original English culture of America might be softened or adapted, while the powerful nation of America remains at the Center; this is an idea that I am still playing with and whose truth I am not in a position to evaluate, since so much of it will only be known in the future and can only be guessed at now. But it remains that this idea of Edge and Center nations is an intriguing one that I find myself believing, to the extent that I understand it.

Having written my notes, I then began the next night to write the chapter. I had brought Wang-mu and Peter to the end of their meal at the restaurant, and was ready to have them meet a Japanese character for the first time. But it was four in the morning. My wife, Kristine, awake to take care of our one-year-old baby, Zina, took the chapter fragment out of my hand and read it. As I prepared for sleep, she also dozed off, but then awoke to tell me of a dream she had in that momentary nap. She had dreamed that the Japanese of Divine Wind carried their ancestors' ashes in tiny lockets or amulets that they wore around their necks; and Peter felt lost because he had only one ancestor, and he would die when that ancestor died. I knew at once that I had to use this idea; then I lay down in bed, picked up Oe's book again, and began to read.

Imagine my surprise, then, when after that first passage dealing with Oe's feelings toward Scandinavia, he plunged into analyses of Japanese culture and literature that explicitly developed precisely the idea that had leapt into my mind just from reading those opening, seemingly unrelated paragraphs about Nils. He, a man who has studied and cared about the peripheral (or Edge) peoples of Japan, especially the culture of Okinawa, conceived of Japan as a culture that was in danger of losing its Center. Serious Japanese literature, he said, was decaying precisely because Japanese intellectuals were "accepting" and "discharging" Western ideas, not particularly believing them but caught up in their fashionableness, while ignoring those powerful ideas inherent in the Yamato (native Japanese) culture which would give Japan the power to become a self-standing Center nation. He even used, finally, the words "center" and "edge" in this sentence: