What You Are Looking for is in the Library

by Michiko Aoyama

what do people think about me based on my job? What does it say about my personality or qualities?

Sometimes, though, I think about the future. What will I be doing years from now? I don’t have the same kind of burning desire like I used to when all I wanted was to escape to Tokyo, and I don’t feel excited any more about achieving a goal. That all fizzled away, like froth.

It’s hard to see anyone since I don’t have weekends off.

What am I looking for? I’m looking for... A reason to work, something I’m good at—stuff like that.

“Well, I mean... Anybody can do it. It’s not like it was my dream job or anything I desperately wanted to do. I just kind of fell into it. But I live on my own, so I have to work to support myself.”

“You managed to find employment, you go to work every day and you can feed yourself. That’s a fine achievement.”

How could I have forgotten the story when I’d read it so many times before? Or misremembered, more like. It’s fun, though, to reread a book I loved as a kid. You pick up new things.

What am I supposed to do...? But the anger overrides everything and my mind is a blank—for the life of me, I can’t think of an appropriate response.

So there I am, the budding career woman and local girl made good, crying and shaking with anger.

“I had no time to eat and my health was shit. I used to rely on nutrition drinks and supplements. Then one day I was looking at them lying all around my desk when I suddenly thought—what am I working for?” He tosses the last of the rice ball into his mouth. “I was working in order to eat, but I never had time to eat because of work—that seemed crazy.”

“Now I actually have a life. A decent life. I eat properly, sleep, and enjoy reading books and magazines because I don’t have to think about them from a work point of view. I’m fit, healthy, and every day is a new beginning.”

“Nah, not every company’s like that. I just happened to land in one which operates that way. Besides, I don’t want to diss the others doing their best in that company. There are people who can work at that pace and keep themselves in good shape. People who find it fulfilling to completely immerse themselves in work and nothing else. It just wasn’t me.”

“In a world where you don’t know what will happen next, I just do what I can right now.”

“At first, I knew nothing, but stick with it and you’ll learn along the way. That’s all that’s needed.”

What I do know is that there’s no need to panic, or do more than I can cope with right now. For the time being, I plan to simply get my life in order and learn some new skills, choosing from what’s available. I’ll prepare myself, like Guri and Gura gathering chestnuts in the forest. Because I never know when I might find my own giant egg.

All the petty worries of daily life, troubles at school, Mom’s nagging, anxieties about my future—no matter how stressed out I felt, all I had to do was open that door to step into another world. It was a place where I could be myself; where I was accepted for who I was.

But will one day ever come?

I laugh dutifully while inwardly cursing myself for giving away too much.

I have a hard time knowing how to deal with people.

But I know that no matter where I work, the stress of human relations is not something I can easily escape.

But time is slipping away while I’m stuck in this office grind.

But the more I say ‘one day’ the more I feel like it might only ever be a dream.”

“Is that what you think? That it will only ever be a dream? As long as you continue to say the words ‘one day,’ the dream is not over. Maybe it will simply remain a beautiful dream. It may never come true. But that is one way to live, in my opinion. The days go by more happily when you have something to dream about. It’s not always a bad thing to have a dream, with no plan for ever carrying it out.”

“But if you need to know what lies beyond the dream, you need to know.”

“A parallel career means having two careers that are complementary, with neither being secondary to the other.”

Unhappily biding my time in an office doing a job that doesn’t excite me? And on top of everything, come home and not be able to stop thinking about work?

My job controls me. A job I don’t want to be doing.

Much as I dislike it, I depend on my job and desperately want to protect it. It has always been that way and no doubt always will.

I wish I could be like her. Only ever doing work that I like, and not having to deal with idiots, or worrying about financial insecurity, and whenever I make a tiny bit of money getting all excited and opening a bottle of wine to celebrate.

And the strange thing is that surrendering myself to the wonders of a world apart from humans makes me begin to feel calmer.

Yet from a plant’s perspective, aboveground and belowground are both equally important and in perfect balance. Humans only see what suits them most, and make that their main focus, but for plants... Both are main.

“Timing is all-important. Don’t let the right moment slip by.”

“That’s what I wanted to see! Choosing to do something because it excites you is the best reason of all. I just know it.”

Patience. If only I could buy it, I’d place a bulk order.

Where else could we go that would allow us to pass the time pleasantly without raising my stress levels?

“Singles are envious of those who are married, and married couples envy those with children, but people with children are envious of singles. It’s an endless merry-go-round. But isn’t that funny? That each person should be chasing the tail of the person in front of them, when no one is coming first or last. In other words, when it comes to happiness nothing is better or worse—there is no definitive state.”

From big things to little, there are some things we simply cannot force to go to plan, no matter how hard we try.

How uncanny the way what one reads can sometimes synchronize with reality.

“You may say that it was the book, but it’s how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.”

“It’s just how things worked out. I went with the flow and did what was easiest at the time to achieve what I wanted. Moment by moment—circumstances always change, quite independently from what we want to do. A family situation, for example, or health issues, or a job might go when a company folds, or one could fall in love out of the blue.”

“Things change, even if you want them to stay the same. At the same time, you can try to change, but you will still remain the same.”

“There is no ‘why.’ It’s just the way things turned out. Isn’t it a good thing to want more great books in the world? I want to read them too.”

“This didn’t just come to you. It happened because you did something for yourself. You took action and that caused things to change around you.”

I thought of who might pick up this book and how they might react to it. Ah... I did so want to make books. Books that made one look forward to tomorrow, or helped reveal hidden depths within oneself.

“In the case of one hundred people, one person out of a hundred is one per cent, correct?” “Yeah.” “But in the case of one person doing the thing they want to do, there is only yourself, which means one person out of one, which is one hundred percent.”

“What kind of job do you think is totally secure?”

“Not one single job I could name is absolutely secure. Everybody just does their best to hang in there, trying to balance it all.”

“There’s no guarantee of certainty in anything. But the flip side to there being no guarantee of security, is that there’s also no certainty that something is a dud.”

“People who make fun of me now won’t stop, no matter what the future brings. They’ll always find some angle to attack me with. But don’t worry, I’m okay with it. I don’t care what people who’ve never read my novels think.”

Everything about him is thin and delicate. His neck, his fingers, even his hair. He may look mild on the outside, but inside he’s steel.