A reflection on how family hardship affects children, and how literature, life in Kyoto, and a decade devoted to business shaped the author’s understanding of human diversity and suffering.

That human beings are all different, and that there are countless people who carry problems, becomes clearly understandable once one becomes an adult, but when one is a child, for whom the home is a lair, things are not so.
2016-11-21.
That human beings are all different, and that there are countless people who carry problems, becomes clearly understandable once one becomes an adult, but when one is a child, for whom the home is a lair, things are not so.
When one thinks about it after becoming an adult, it goes without saying that even family problems that amount to nothing can become fatal suffering for a child.
When faced with domestic misfortune, no child can remain unscathed.
It also goes without saying that almost all people who possess the means to escape will try to escape.
As already mentioned, I had read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in its entirety when I was in junior high school.
It was only natural that the passage in the great speech spoken by Dmitri’s defense counsel in this novel—“If every father were a good father to his children, human problems would be solved”—remained most deeply engraved in my heart.
As already mentioned, in order to escape the domestic misfortune—which was the greatest and most painful of the sufferings that God gave me in exchange for the intellect He bestowed upon me (and which I have referred to several times from the opening of Tolstoy’s greatest novel Anna Karenina)—I literally spent my youth like that described in Le Clézio’s The Book of Flights.
In the course of that time, there was a period when I supported myself by working as a live-in part-time worker at a merchant household in Kyoto.
As already mentioned, I was recently moved when I learned that this merchant house had been three doors down from the birthplace of Ito Jakuchu.
Eventually, having realized that I could no longer return to what my mentor had commanded me—“Remain at Kyoto University and bear Kyoto University upon your shoulders,” in other words, live in the world of scholarship—I decided thereafter to devote myself exclusively to business for ten years, working like a draft horse without watching movies I wanted to see or reading books I wanted to read, as already mentioned.
It goes without saying that having walked the path of an entrepreneur from nothing, with Osaka as the stage of my life, I was neither a scholar nor a writer.
This manuscript continues.