Triggered by music that surfaced in a half-awake moment, this essay looks back on a paper written and released to the world on August 7, 2011, during a seven-month hospitalization for a life-threatening illness.
An introspective reflection on music, solitude, and a life lived as a thorough outsider.

May 30, 2016

This morning, as I awoke and lay dozing, this piece of music flowed through my mind.
What follows is an essay that I wrote in a hospital room on August 7, 2011, when I was suffering from a life-threatening illness and had been hospitalized for seven months, and that I sent out to the world.
For people from Sendai, August 7 immediately brings to mind the Tanabata festival.
The mere fact that I was writing this essay on that day gives me deep emotions.
Yesterday, living a life in which I sleep when the little birds sleep and wake when the little birds wake, I rose as usual—or rather, a little early—before five o’clock.
Thinking it might be a bit too early, I lay dozing in bed, when music came to mind, and astonishingly, it was John Lennon’s “Isolation.”
Just as I wondered what song had come, the next one that flowed was “God Is a Concept.”
Good heavens—what truly special songs they were that came to mind.
I then thought I must search for my most treasured photographs to match this music.
At the same time, I recalled the words of Kurikinton-san from yesterday:
“I felt the photographs were almost too precious.”
That’s right, I thought again.
And today, after going to bed having watched the final episode of NHK BS’s “Zhou Enlai Special” last night, I woke even earlier than yesterday, at four o’clock.
As I lay in bed thinking, “This really is a bit too early,” the music that flowed through my mind was Arcade Fire’s “Lenin.”
Such things do not happen to a mind like mine by mere chance.
There are reasons for all of these things.
Very well, then—I’ll get up and take a look at Goo.
If, once again, many people there are reading my writings, I thought I would upload them together with my wonderful photographs as a token of thanks.
Yesterday, I wrote about Yoshimoto Takaaki.
To put it very simply, as readers, close friends, and those who have been around me well know, I have lived a thoroughly outsider’s life.
As I have written several times, it would not be an exaggeration to say that I walked the same path as Shakyamuni and Christ. (Ha-ha, a big laugh.)
The giants of thought—or rather, the “companions on this journey”—that I chose were completely different from the so-called cultural figures; naturally, they were, so to speak, Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
Hawaii, which I visited forty-seven times… Normally, stories that only I could write, using these islands as their theme, should long ago have been written and by now become huge bestsellers. (Laughs.)
For example, when I was alone in Waikiki toward the end of a trip to Hawaii, listening to John Lennon’s music on my iPod, standing on the pavement facing Waikiki Beach Shore, gazing at the sea, and feeling waves of sobbing again and again, the gaze in my eyes was precisely what Kierkegaard called “the gaze of Frithiof looking out at the sea.”
The thought that existed within me there was not in the least inferior to Yoshimoto Takaaki’s thought—indeed, it surpassed it. (Ha-ha, a big laugh.)
Why that is, I will leave as a mystery for now.
The Beatles – Free As A Bird