This title is the English name of Ōe's novel Sayonara, watashi no hon yo!, part of his late cycle about the writer Kogito Choko. Kogito and an old friend, an architect, plan an ambitious project while both look back on their lives and on the political violence of recent history. Reading, literature and the consequences of ideas run through the book. It is a reflective late work, dense with references, that asks what a writer owes the world after a long life with books.