Originally published on July 6, 2019.
This piece introduces the opening section of Hiroshi Furuta’s new serial essay, “Fighting Epicurus: The True Figures of Seers and Swindlers,” published in the August issue of WiLL.
With bold humor, including his remark that subscribing to North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun for thirty years cost him 2.7 million yen, Furuta writes candidly and vividly about the decline of print media, changes in readership, his illness, and his resolve to live as a man of letters.

2019-07-06
I subscribed to North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun for thirty years and lost 2.7 million yen, so I would say that makes us about even.

The following is from an essay by Hiroshi Furuta published in the August issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title, Fighting Epicurus: The True Figures of Seers and Swindlers.
As I have already written, until August five years ago, when I was still subscribing to The Asahi Shimbun, I did not know him at all.
As I have also already written, he is the very image of a late bloomer, possessed of splendid humor, and one of the genuine scholars produced by postwar Japan, as well as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Korean Peninsula.
In this chapter as well, all readers are sure to burst out laughing several times.
Greeting for a New Serial.
Now that this is to be a new serial, I thought in various ways about what I ought to write.
No matter how much one struggles, print media will probably shrink to the utmost within another twenty years.
We live in an age when, after assigning a report to students at the University of Tsukuba, one is calmly told, “Professor, I hate reading books.”
Even if I write something slightly elevated, like in my previous serial, the editor-in-chief of this magazine says to me, “Um… it seems that no one is reading it…,” and then it becomes troublesome to make excuses again.
I have also lost the boldness to shamelessly spend thirty-eight installments interpreting the Old Testament based only on knowledge from the internet.
Did I make about two million yen with no capital at all?
Well, I subscribed to North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun for thirty years and lost 2.7 million yen, so that makes us about even, and on top of that I myself am preaching the usefulness of the internet while helping to destroy print media, so that is quite something.
And then I came down with lung cancer.
I had surgery, but I already have emphysema.
Even the doctor was appalled, saying that my lungs were white, hard, and in terrible condition, so I think I would be fortunate if I could live for another ten years at most.
So then, what should I write?
It will not become a book, and even if it does, it probably will not sell, and while I am writing, print media may keep shrinking until WiLL magazine itself disappears.
To begin with, even if I try in my own way to write something good, I do not gain readers.
Because I say things more stylishly than others, perhaps I may at least become something like an authority for the magazine.
But it is hardly interesting for only the hollow decoration of “Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba” to shine.
So then.
This is something I would like to ask the readers: what would you think of a serial that pays no attention at all to its readers?
I can almost hear the response, “Wasn’t that how it has always been!”
But that is not true.
Until now, in my own way, I have thought through and through of nothing but the readers.
I reluctantly added readings to difficult kanji.
In truth, I am a man of classical Chinese culture.
Moreover, I am a stylist.
If you think I am lying, take a look at The Intellectual Landscape of East Asia, which I wrote long ago for Iwanami Shoten.
That did not sell at all either, but when I open the copy now sitting on my shelf, the prose is truly beautiful and nostalgic.
It is even included every year in Z-kai’s Japanese entrance-exam problem collections.
So, what kind of serial should this be?
Since later on in the hospital I will probably have an oxygen tube stuck into my nostrils, I thought perhaps I should make it the sort of thing where, holding up the magazine and looking straight above, I burst into loud laughter, then cough violently, and drop the magazine from the bed.
Since this will probably be my last serial, I would like it to be writing that keeps both mind and body healthy and does not become empty.
After all, what I had wanted to become since childhood was a man of letters, and that wish has already been fulfilled, so there is nothing for me to struggle over anymore.
To be continued.