October 8, 2011

Writing from a hospital room during the third stage of a severe medical struggle, the author reflects on blood transfusions, gratitude to his readers, and the truth that every human life is sustained by others.
He addresses his mother, who died in the tsunami of March 11, 2011, promises to live to at least the age of ninety-five and continue fulfilling his mission, and vows to present her with The Turntable of Civilization, which he calls the finest book of postwar Japan.

In the midst of my “Destroy Every Last Villain” battle, yesterday was the hardest day of the third stage.
I spent almost the entire day lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep.
Even returning the “Peta” visits of readers on Ameba who had left a sign saying, “I read your article,” was almost more than I could manage.
Even so, I asked my acquaintance, U, to return those visits for me.
Why?
Because those small signs from readers ordinarily encourage me in ways that I scarcely notice.
For me, returning a Peta is the writer’s way of saying “Thank you” to the reader.
To speak honestly, my mother’s life was not a happy one.
Nevertheless, she continued saying, “I am grateful.”
That was how you lived, Mother, like Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
You were remarkable.
As those who were around me know, I was like the very model of a man with an inexhaustible supply of energy.
Before I was old enough to understand the world, and before I could retain memories of my childhood, I nearly died from the epidemic dysentery that was prevalent at the time.
My mother told me that my life was saved because my father was on close terms with the director of Sendai Municipal Hospital.
Apart from that, I had never been hospitalized.
Naturally, I had never received a blood transfusion.
This present struggle, however, is no ordinary struggle.
At every stage, a blood transfusion becomes necessary.
Whenever that happens, I think the same thing.
Human beings are always kept alive and enabled to live by other people.
I am not speaking merely of family.
Those who were close to me will immediately remember that I often said the same thing while we enjoyed good food and drink together.
I have now realized that my mother said it in exactly the same profound sense as I did.
That realization is also a source of sorrow to me.
Mother, I am fighting.
I will certainly win.
I will live for at least ninety-five years—the lifespan that God granted to our family, as you yourself knew very well—and I will continue fulfilling my mission.
You died without knowing that my mission was to write and to continue writing.
You were swallowed by the tsunami.
Because something resembling a declaration that I had severed relations with my siblings had taken place, I had still not gone to see you.
No one could ever have imagined that such a thing would happen.
Yet, as though warned by some premonition, I repeatedly felt that I had to visit you in the nursing home, taking a personal computer as a present, and tell you that I had begun writing and that I was writing every day.
While I continued thinking that I must do so, March 11 suddenly arrived.
That is why my regret is multiplied many times over.
Yet I heard at Nijo Castle, from Lord Ieyasu, that you were watching over me.
In the garden of the abbot’s residence at Chion-in Temple, I felt that you appeared before me for a single instant of light, having taken the form of a certain pine tree.
At the end of this October, I will present you with the finest book of postwar Japan—the finest book in Japan.
MIKIO KISARA