Written for a Japanese audience (for whom he wrote a great deal over the years), this memoir is dated December 1982. It opens with details of the author's birth in 1908 and young life in the Cologne region of Germany, takes us through the fascinating experiences of his youth, then into the 1930s, his first encounter with Japan as a language student in 1935, followed by further Jesuitical studies in Britain that concluded with a period at SOAS, University of London, before setting off for Japan again in 1940--this time to spend the rest of his life there.