He depicts Japanese society thinly but unfolds in elaborate, obsessively repetitive yet finely varied detail the agonies inflicted upon Japan's Christian converts and the European missionaries who minister to them, as well as the intellectual arguments mustered by Japanese officials to justify their exactions and by missionaries to defend their own activities.
The world's Lafontaines cannot understand that overly-exacting exactions extinguish economic innovation and risk-taking.
With its economy disrupted, its administration disorganized, its army depleted and demoralized, its factions engaging in civil strife, its peasants enfeebled by excessive exactions, its religious dissenters alienated by persecution, and its authority challenged by a powerful aristocracy, the empire lacked the strength necessary to expel the invaders, and possibly even to survive.
Krovatin asked what Arum meant by "exactions," since the sanctioning bodies provide championship belts to fighters.
Despite this success, the provinces were increasingly uneasy, for they were oppressed by exactions to cover Nero's extravagant expenditures on his court, new buildings, and gifts to his favourites; the last expenditures alone are said to have amounted to more than two billion sesterces, a sum that was several times the annual cost of the army.
Then, in spite of grave discontent aroused by his exactions in Italy, Octavian declared war not against Antony but against Cleopatra.
Furthermore, ships coming into the harbour were liable to a host of petty exactions and fees levied by the Chinese authorities.
The couple's sexual troubles are power troubles, the emotional exactions or physical threats by which Freddie gets Alice to have illegal abortions (which, as she says, put her health at great risk).
