Month: March 2023 (page 1 of 1)

March,2020

Since I had lived alone in a cheap, cramped room of my new condo, I had hardly talked with anyone. Until now, I had led the life of a hermit who was voluntarily imprisoned and who would have liked to study hard. For me, Japan was finished. My whole being was directed overseas. I had nothing left but say goodbye. Growing up to be an oddball, I had long since become insensible by being alone.

I had been overcome by Japanese who put pressure on you to conform and no longer wanted anything to do with people who was stuck and buried in their work–including my family and relatives. “What do you do next?” That was what I had expected and counted on. You never understand. I knew I had been guilty of everything myself and I would never accept a single person into my life. At any rate, there was no one to lose by disappearing forever. The outside world was gone and I had peace of mind.

After running in the mornings, I paced to and fro in front of the TV. The world suddenly changed due to the coronavirus, and so did my daily routine. The stock prices plunged and plunged. This was the biggest crash since the 2008 financial crisis, which at the time I was too ignorant to get the seriousness of the matter. Yet this time all the foundation of my existence began to rock. I shuddered with excitement. I was like, “When is the bottom?” I imagined what it would be like if, instead of working, my assets increased tenfold. The more it fell, the stronger yen was. I had to buy dollars…to leave Japan.

Suddenly young people in uniforms disappeared from the streets, and then old memories came over me. How glad I would have been if I had been a high school student. I had detested my old school, where I had made the big mistake, which from then caused me a great deal of distress. And at the same time I felt a deep, joyful consolation that it was a boy, who was a victim of bullying, was salvaged by Corona. Your mother would say: “Don’t go out otherwise you get infected.” Luckily, you would be free from a long pitiful school life. You can create a new life. Surely new world will welcome you and invite you, where no one knew you. 

My standard of living was very low. It all was my fault. I did not make the exertion when I was young, even though I had a rich environment to study, which I felt to be the bitter present. It had plagued me for years and years.

Perhaps I was an oddball; I was not able to do the same things the others did. Now they were doctors, dentists, and entrepreneurs. I had searched their names on Facebook. What was I compared to them? How long would this have taken them? What difficulties would they had bore? This I could not do. If I had had the strength and toughness to make something of myself, everything would turn out differently. I would not have had to become a blue-color worker. I could have been a doctor too.

It was to be quiet and let the old be gone. I believed everything was still possible, all I had to do was study, which I neglected to in high school, and I was left with the strange, yet irrepressible passion of being like my father. It was my destiny to make exertion in the expiation of my endless guilt.

I wished to leave this room as soon as possible, which was too small to place a sofa and in which the whole thing spoke of work and asceticism, where no reminiscences of women could be found. If you look out through the window, there is not anything special. You just see a big house, whose windows were shuttered down all the time, as if to show undue caution, and then you have to go away quickly, so as not to let them think you peek. It seemed to me that I felt cut off from the world, as if there were enemies in this house, whose intention one did not know, and against whom one feigned indifference.

The residents of my condo, head down and slowly walking so withdrawn, sullen, and indifferent. There could be nothing to be done about it. I yearned longingly for the last two year I lived in the Caribbean country. Ah, how often I had greeted strangers and talked with them, how often I had absentmindedly been comfortable and smiled.

Through a wall next door, I had heard a boy’s voice, singing and talking to himself with animated; moaning and then kicking something with all his strength, maybe absorbed in video game. All day long he was home and enjoyed by himself. Perhaps his weird voice stemmed from a developmental disorder such as autism.

On the other side next door, if you made even a slightest noise in your daily life, almost immediately you could hear a flicking sound such as closing a paper door quickly, as if to say: “Shut up!” I assumed he suffered from schizophrenia. What I know of them was that socially withdraw men lived isolated from the outside world. Indeed, of their past lives and origins I know nothing at all.

The way they carried themselves I did not at all like at first. I know the severity of society. There is no mercy for those who is hopelessly　incompetent at work. Consequently he is kick out by it whether you suffer from mental disorder or not. I remembered excuses she made up after she made mistakes at work: “I’m sorry. I’m ADHD.” I did not like it that she was caught up in a tangle of sacrifices and small expedient. It is useless vanity and her work never keep her go forward. Another man, who had Asperger’s disorder, was demoted later. He could not read between the lines, even when I stated clearly, he prioritized his own obsessions.

They would have worked with every fiber of his being, but they were not much. You could observe their folly, but you had to let them go their own way. There has got to be a great clarity inside him, however, and they have no talent for work in Japan, where group harmony is preserved. I would have not long to live in this strange country, for we had gifts, more than a lot of other ordinary people. I was proud that I had while I missed something they had. I missed it.

I had already endured as much as I could of wretchedness. Under such conditions I could not consider my future logical and good. I was truly alone. There were no help with my problems of adolescence. It was absolutely certain that I escaped from the reality I would never become my father, simultaneously, mocking his audios toil and the difficulty of the path to what they call the genuine vocation.

I rode my bike to and from school along Purple river. I occasionally stopped to be late for school and then I clambered down the riverbank. As soon as I took my seat I became nobody, with a real feeling. I would remain here a little while; no one looked at me. I was free and alone. At heart, however, the misery of the past year and months–the inconsolable gloom–encompassed me. My school life was empty, although I had had a few friends. It was my own affair to come to terms with my self and to find my own way. The river flowed softly and quietly. 

What my curiosity sought was from outside world, where high school students work part-time. I simply wished to get rid of my loneliness and imprisonment and to have peace, intending to become at least an ordinary person who carries on with his normal life.

I spent after school working at a bento shop, groping my way forward. There were the students who went to different stupid schools. As I was new, I greeted each one with the shrinking timidity that I felt in the presence of punks. Soon afterwards we were talking with one another. For how long hadn’t I really talked to anyone? I was very glad to be allowed to have a little share in their youth. In a friendly fashion, every one talked with me, laughed, and teased me a bit. I had never indulged in this way I let myself go. I liked it that they did not judge people based on your educational background. I was no longer a solitary boy.

None of them was not going to apply to college, nor was poor. They just wanted enough money for their enjoyment–motorcycle and car, karaoke and bowling and billiard, smoking and hanging out at family restaurant. The lives of ne’er-do-wells sounded interesting. I was much with a few friendly boys. I liked them. Nevertheless, something was lacking in my heart. I had observed that there is a end somewhere, and that everything I should have have and done for myself alone, sinks into an abyssal sea; however it reposed, in my innermost soul.

In my last school year when all students began to talk about university, I had a good time at work. Meanwhile, viewed from the outside, I was going downhill. Working was a distraction when I also begun to think about it. My determination seemed to grow in opposition to my true will– my father, an unpretentious and open-hearted man who finds satisfaction in his study. Too long he had been accustomed to be indifferent to me. Subconsciously, I had been so frustrated and angry with my father.

The autumn came, and I longed for the spring I would go somewhere new and start over fresh. I had no thought to give to the future, to the fate of my vocation. I was so much more interesting in things outside of school rather than learning in the university. I had had a strenuous year at work, and now I felt with comfort and with joy that I was a part of the world, where I barely sensed sad monotony. I wanted only to live in accord with promptings which came from myself.

One evening in autumn I rode my bike on my way home. A man came down the hill as I went up. “Hold on. Look who’s here!” he said in a daze. “K! It’s been a long time. How have you been?” “I’m good, sir,” I hesitated. At the sight of him, the hideous  misery before which I fled fell up on me-everything I thought reminded me bitterly of what I had done, and of the total stupid I now was. He was the English teacher at the cram school when I was ninth grade, where he had showed favor to me. 

By degrees I heard some anecdotes of him and of her. The past, they were inferior to me, and I felt I was outside the circle. The conversation in an convivial, light tone, which was difficult for me, for I was now truly quite a different person from a boy he had known before. I recalled those days had diminished with time, but now his affectionate approach had brought back a few memories, making me feel too guilty.

It was when I was hospitalized with a pneumothorax that despite working late, he visited me in the morning. He would have spoken in his accustomed humor manner. I liked his comical aspect as well as his teaching. He had expected me. Difficult problems in English that he gave only to me I had been struggling with in the middle of the night.

“Where will you be going to University?”he asked, and his voice were friendly and jesting. It was painful for me–I had desired to live a little more contentedly and easily. “I’m planning to apply to F University,” I said quietly, feeling ashamed. Stunned, he said nothing. We were silent for a little while.“You’ve got to be kidding,” he gawked at me. When he approached me with sympathy and disbelief, my old memories stirred in me. “What’s wrong with you?” he shook me by the shoulders. “K,” he said soberly. “I believe there was some incomprehensible misfortune.” Something within me kept me from the agony that strangled me. “No, no. I’ve been too lazy and comfortable to study,”I laughed a little, which was but pretexts and subterfuges. He appeared to have something else to say, and my half-evasive answers did not please him. He nodded like he understood and left it unsaid. “I see,” he muttered and soon went away.

Now I was pedaling my bike again, but found myself distracted and inwardly restless, and stopped at the cram school, where a teacher I had never seen before stood on the platform. Then I looked thorough the glass at the junior high school students in the bright light, and immediately moved away. How I am born, tortured, and fall considerably short of expectations–what a man is to himself. I wandered aimlessly through the darkness.