2010-11-12
At our company, the records of everything that happened during that time are piled up in four cardboard boxes, but neither our kindhearted executive director nor I will ultimately choose to fight this man. Why? Because we think that this is simply our way of living, and that yours is your way of living.
It occurs to me that your prefecture has produced antisocial people, but has not produced a single truly great person.
Look back through history. My prefecture is different. From several hundred years ago right up to the present, it is full of great people.
I am convinced that my dearest classmates, those who came before me, and those who came after me are unquestionably such people too.
Including me, who has now begun writing like this, one of the greatest of the postwar era.
I think your misfortune was that the person you are so desperately confronting was probably the only genuine politician in Japan today, a politician capable of holding his own on the world stage.
I think it is because you did the opposite of what Tracy Chapman wrote and wished for after living a life different from the one she, like all people whose hearts are in the right place, had envisioned.
You mistakenly thought that life was power.
You lost sight of the fact that it was really the opposite—philosophy—and that is proving fatal to you.
That aside, for my part, these past twenty years have recently been appearing before me from a certain angle.
The interest rates at which I could borrow were always above 10 percent. The taxes I paid… billions of yen.
And yet I am completely unknown, and my words do not have the loud voice that yours do.
Is it not only natural that I should sometimes weep in frustration?
Is it not only natural that nights of strange feelings should come?
It was like that this morning too. Everything about all of this flashed through my mind in an instant, and my rhythm was more leisurely than usual… There was nothing to watch, and the various strains of the day…
I could not even read Mr. Saito’s book. You all probably have presbyopia. Part of it was that I, too, had trouble reading yesterday, but there was no one with whom to share love either…
On a night like this, I should just go to sleep. There is nothing to do but sleep. Surely, tomorrow, I will be born…
I had even thought of going to sleep before ten, but I went to sleep at eleven and got up at half past seven.
I woke up in bed, and a little while later, I was born.
When I was about to get into the cheapest taxi with the most courteous driver, after keeping him waiting quite a while, tears overflowed…
Yesterday morning, I called someone about something, speaking in Harvard talk—rapid-fire speech like a machine gun—out of consideration for how busy the other person probably was. That was the beginning of my exhaustion.
And there was my aching feeling: if you would publish my book, that would fulfill my heart’s desire…
But because this was the life I had lived, I had always found it difficult to ask people for things…
Those thoughts came to me just as I was about to get into the taxi.
At just that moment, the driver said something about confirming my name, so I gave my name in a strange voice.
I thought about all sorts of things, particularly the close friends I had made since entering working life—both of them are now in Tokyo.
The few people in Osaka whom I have often been meeting with over the past several years… They are all fine businessmen…
My long stories, which everyone sometimes finds exhausting even to listen to—though the person doing the talking is the most exhausted of all.
I realized that, at those times, I had actually been asking for help.
I had wanted somehow to escape these twenty painful years…
I had wanted, then, to put an end to a life of interest rates above 10 percent…
But because I was a born handsome boy, I could not simply say, help me, and twenty years had passed.