Novelist Haruki Murakami on Sunday warned against excluding outsiders and rewriting history during his acceptance speech at Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award for 2016.
"No matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and hurting ourselves," he said.
The 67-year-old author did not specify what he meant by "wall" or "outsiders," but he may have been referencing the increase in anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and other parts of the world.