Three Worlds

Michael Standaert has posted an interview with Minae Mizumura on Nipposkiss. She talks about the "three worlds" in which she grew up.

My parents had brought with them a whole collection, a series of
novels. When Japan became a middle
class country it began to have a
large reading population and in order to educate middle class people
they started publishing novels in series format, where you would buy
like 20, 30, 40 books at once, four or five books arriving at once, and
after two years you would have a whole collection. My parents had that
and brought it with them. It was rather old, published in 1925-26, it
came from the generation before my parents. They brought that and I was
reading it all the time. I was very happy in that world. And I didn’t
realize I wasn’t reading the same thing as what the Japanese youth were
reading. I was reading the old books.