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I thought I’d come to terms with the fact that I was going to die soon, but now that I’d been offered a way out, I found myself willing to try anything, no matter how ridiculous it seemed.
But when death stares you in the face, you find yourself willing to accept a helping hand from anyone, even the devil, in order to stay alive. It’s basic human instinct. Dignity and respectability fly out the window at that point.
Countless people with whom I seemed to have had some kind of a relationship, but when push comes to shove, I didn’t actually share much of a connection with them after all.
I’ve connected with many people over the course of my life, but the relationships were ultimately all superficial.
“In order to gain something, you have to lose something,” she always said. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.
When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety that comes with not having one on you.
For all we know, there might be all sorts of things that have already disappeared without our having noticed it, things that we’d assumed would always be around.
I had left the work of memory and even my ties to other human beings to my mobile phone. It’s pretty scary to think about what these devices have done to the human brain.
But when we actually spent time with each other, there wasn’t much to talk about. On the phone, it somehow seemed more intimate, even though we weren’t with each other in person. We would have the most involved conversations over the most inconsequential things.
I’d heard somewhere that people forget things in order to build new memories.
You have to forget some things in order to move on in life. But I was beginning to question this theory. I realized, now that I was staring death in the face, I found myself remembering lots of trivial things, things I’d nearly forgotten about.
I must have a whole collection of small injuries, tucked away somewhere in the recesses of my memory. I suppose those are what some people call regrets.
I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so, we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it must come to an end.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.”
Life is about desire, not meaning. Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
“Just so you know, this life-prolonging deal we’ve made has always worked out okay for me in the past. Every time. If I mess up, God will be angry with me. No more of this passing out in the street, okay? We’ve come this far.”
Look, I’ll level with you, I didn’t want to give up anything, most especially not my collection of anime figures or my limited edition sneakers, but it was the same as, say, getting rid of hats, or Pepsi, or ice cream. I wouldn’t like it, but it’s not like I’d die without them. I’d give that all up in a second in exchange for my life.
Basically, all human beings really need to survive is food, water, and shelter. In other words, pretty much everything in this world, everything that humans have made, is pretty unnecessary. They’re fun to have around, but we could do without them.
And if that’s the case, I wondered if perhaps movies, music, coffee, and pretty much everything else had some kind of meaning as well. Once you start down that train of thought, then all those things you once thought were unnecessary turn out to be important for one reason or another. If you’re trying to separate out the scores of “meaningless things” in the world from everything else, you’ll eventually have to make a judgment about human beings, about our existence.
Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who has changed, and seeing the same film again makes that impossible to forget.
My hope is that my life will go on to live in the memories of others who’ve witnessed my story.
“You only realize what the really important things are once you’ve lost them.”
“So, human beings may think that they’re looking at the world as it’s supposed to be, but they’ve got it all wrong. In fact, they’ve just imposed a meaning on something and come up with a definition for what the world is supposed to be all about in a way that just happens to suit them. And I just thought it might be interesting for people to see what the world would be like without that pesky system of telling the time that humans just made up for their own convenience.
In any case, I didn’t have anything to do on this particular day, so I thought I’d just kill some time, even though there was no time to kill. Even if I had decided to waste time, there was no time to waste either. This really left me with very little to go on.
With freedom comes uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety. Human beings exchanged their freedom for the sense of security that comes from living by set rules and routines—despite knowing that they pay the cost of these rules and regulations with their freedom.
Cabbage, on the other hand, existed in a world without time. No clocks, no schedules, and no being late. For him there was no such thing as categorizing people according to age or what year they were in school, and he had no concept of vacations because there was nothing to have a vacation from in the first place.
He responded only to the changes brought about by natural phenomena or biological factors—like when he’s hungry or sleepy.
I got so caught up with all the little everyday tasks that I ended up wasting the time that I could have been spending on more important things.
Cats are really something, huh, I thought. They’re capable of completely ignoring you half the time, but then they seem to know when you’re really in need of some comforting. Just as cats don’t have any sense of time, loneliness must not exist for them either. There’s simply the time you spend alone and the time you spend with others.
Love. That’s the expression Mom wears on her face in that photograph. What else could you call it apart from love? And love, this magical thing that’s unique to human beings and can sometimes make us absolutely miserable, is also the thing that buoys the human spirit. Like time, color, temperature, and loneliness, love is one of those things that only humans experience. These things can rule over or control us, but they also allow us to live more fully. They are precisely what make us human.
I started to get the sense that the endless ticking sound in my head might actually be the sound of the hearts of all the people in the world beating in time with one another.
As you go on with your life, always remember the things that are good in you. They are your gifts. As long as you have these things, you’ll find happiness, and you’ll make the people around you happy.
There’s a reason why everything exists in this world. And there’s no reason good enough for making them disappear.
But there is one thing I do know: You can persuade yourself to be either happy or sad. It just depends on how you choose to see things.
“Yeah, but just being alive doesn’t mean all that much on its own. How you live is more important.”
“The devil only exists in the hearts and minds of humans, and you can imagine all different kinds of designs. It can be a bit random. Sometimes I have horns or a pitchfork, other times I appear as a dragon. There are infinite possibilities.”
Humans tend to regret the life they never lived and the choices they never made.”
I began to think about all the things I might have made disappear from the world if I’d gone on making deals with the devil. It’s possible that the world wouldn’t have changed that much without these things in it, but it makes you realize that all these individual things make up an entire world.
