I Will Present You With the Greatest Postwar Book, the Finest in Japan, at the End of This October
October 8, 2011

This is an essay written by a writer living through a grave illness, recounting profound love and gratitude toward his late mother.
Reflecting on a mother who endured life’s hardships yet lived always with the word “gratitude,” he speaks of his resolve to live out his mission.

I Will Present You With the Greatest Postwar Book, the Finest in Japan, at the End of This October
October 8, 2011

“Exterminate all villains.” Amid this battle, now in its third stage, yesterday was the hardest day yet.
I spent nearly the entire day dozing in and out of sleep in bed.

Even returning a “footprint” on Ameba to readers who kindly left a note saying, “I read your post,” was too exhausting for me.
Still, I asked my acquaintance, Mr. U, to do it for me. Why? Because such gestures, usually so small, have always been a source of encouragement. A writer’s “thank you” to readers—that is what returning a footprint means to me.

To be honest, my mother’s life was far from happy. Yet she lived always saying “thank you,” like Kannon herself.
Mother, you were truly great.

As those around me knew, I had been like a model of inexhaustible energy. Except for one episode in early childhood, when I nearly died of epidemic dysentery but was saved thanks to my father’s friendship with the director of Sendai Municipal Hospital, I had never been hospitalized.
Naturally, I had never received a transfusion either.

But this battle is no ordinary one. At each stage, transfusions become necessary.
And each time, I think the same thought: human beings live only because they are kept alive by others.
It is never simply about family. Those who knew me will recall how often I said this when enjoying good food and drink.

Now I realize, though it saddens me, that my mother had said the very same thing, in exactly the same profound sense.

Mother, I am fighting, and I will surely win. I will live at least to ninety-five—the span of life God granted our family, as you well knew—and continue to fulfill my mission.

It grieves me that you passed away without knowing that my mission was to write, and to keep writing—that you were swept away by the tsunami before learning this.
Because of the estrangement with my brothers, I did not go to see you in those final days.

No one could have imagined such an outcome. Yet, as if by premonition, I kept thinking I must visit you at the nursing home, bring you a computer as a gift, and tell you that I was writing every day. And then suddenly, March 11 came.

For that reason, my regret is boundless. Yet I know you are watching over me. Lord Ieyasu told me so at Nijō Castle.
In the abbot’s garden at Chion-in, I felt you appear in the form of a pine tree, a flash of light before me.

At the end of this October, I will present you with the greatest postwar book, the finest in Japan.