It is precisely Asahi Shimbun-like hypocrisy that openly writes lies that is cheap liquor.
2014-08-12 / 2014-10-11
The following is a revised and reorganized republication of two chapters concerning Haruki Murakami, originally published on August 12, 2014, and October 11, 2014.
In other words, Master Shurei Sasai is a person widely recognized as a national hero.
Ninety-nine percent of Americans probably know that not knowing entertainers causes no inconvenience whatsoever.
The same applies to Haruki Murakami, over whom television specials and the like make a great fuss every year when the Nobel Prize season comes around.
Such things are nothing more than existences that take away a portion of the people’s time.
If the whole of Japan were to remain in a state in which a person like Haruki Murakami occupied the country and was elevated as a celebrity, that would lead to a decadence affecting even the lives of the people.
What a nation truly needs is to treat, in an appropriate form, genuine scholars and genuine figures such as Master Shurei Sasai, whose greatness becomes clear even after their death, as national heroes.
Yet in reality, comic actors, existences that are nothing more than commercial publicity, or people who have meaning only for a very small number of people, are widely taken up by the mass media.
That is where the problem lies.
I have no idea why Tatsuya Uchida was chosen as a book review committee member by the Asahi Shimbun.
Considering that he himself once said, “Compared with high-class newspapers in Europe and America, Japanese newspapers are at the kindergarten level,” this is a rather biting indicator.
One day, I wrote about the Nikkei, and then wrote about the Asahi Shimbun.
I have thought about their harmful influence in several lectures.
It was an unpleasant piece written on the day Takako Doi died.
The following is the ending of that day’s Shunju column.
As a writer, Haruki Murakami, two years ago, when the territorial disputes among Japan, China, and South Korea intensified, compared the rise of public opinion to getting drunk on cheap liquor.
“We must be careful of acts in which politicians and commentators incite people and behave as if they are generously serving cheap liquor.”
Do not drink cheap liquor.
Do not get drunk on cheap liquor.
Even when criticizing South Korea, I would like to keep that in mind.
Haruki Murakami is now a great bestselling author, and also an extraordinarily wealthy man for a writer.
I have not counted all of his readers, but everyone probably knows this.
There are parts of him that I evaluate to some extent.
That is, he is not an old-style outlaw writer, but reads newspaper articles and lives a regular life, exactly like a corporate person.
He writes manuscripts in the morning and does not write in the afternoon.
At night, he sips liquor while listening to classical music.
There is no doubt that he knows the taste of fine wine.
However, the Shunju passage quoted above is completely wrong.
The so-called Asahi Shimbun-like cheap liquor of false moralism.
Because it openly writes lies.
The very person who has continued drinking such cheap liquor is Haruki Murakami.
I do not evaluate him in his entirety.
To begin with, I have never read even one of his books through to the end.
Nor have I ever wanted to.
There is a reason for that.
He too is one of those people who live slightly below the middle among my classmates.
It goes without saying that, in inverse proportion to the decline of Japan’s national power and the fact that the Turntable of Civilization continued to stand still for twenty years, he came to be treated as a great writer.
I have already written this.
In inverse proportion to the halt in the movement of the Turntable of Civilization, many fakes began to run rampant.
South Korea, which for seventy years has continued fascist education without receiving any criticism.
China, which for twenty-five years has continued to be a fascist state existing in the world of the twenty-first century.
What on earth does it mean when people who write for a living write nothing about them?
Is that not cheap liquor itself?
They grow arrogant, as if they themselves were cultural figures, and they disturb culture.
But that is enough.
It is precisely Asahi Shimbun-like hypocrisy that openly writes lies that is cheap liquor.
Those who have continued drinking that cheap liquor preach to those who try to speak the truth, saying, “Do not get drunk on cheap liquor.”
There could be no more perverse story than this.
As of 2014, I had already clearly seen through this structure.