“Mami Kataoka seems the very model of a modern Japanese woman. She is quietly spoken. She is elegant without following the high-fashion herd, her understated clothes and bold accessories carefully chosen. She smiles a lot. She is impeccably polite, so much so that she manages to thank me prettily for a lacklustre Japanese lunch in Sydney without actually perjuring herself. Yet there are layers to Kataoka, deep intellectual and psychological layers, that reveal themselves slowly, showing her in turn to be not stereotypically of her country and culture at all, but someone altogether more complicated. Those layers are the product of an unusual childhood, one that turned her gaze outward from Japan, onto the world and, more particularly, the world of art, philosophy and ideas.'”
