Recently (while writing my next book, and as a kind of intellectual break from Bakumatsu Japan), I’ve been rereading Nietzsche, including Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886. Along with several other works of Nietzsche, it has been a great influence on my thinking and intellectual development over these past many years. In 1886 Nietzsche was not yet a popular writer. “I am making the experiment of having something published at my own expense,” he wrote to a friend at the time, adding that if only 300 copies could be sold, he could recoup the cost. As of a year later, only 114 copies had been sold of “one of the great books of the nineteenth century, indeed of any century,” remarks Nietzsche’s translator, Walter Kaufmann, in the “Translator’s Preface.”