A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

“I keep myself together by living other people’s pain,” he said eventually with an indescribably lonesome smile. “It’s like the expression ‘the man who goes mummy hunting ends up a mummy himself . . .’ Do you understand what it’s like to be honest through lies? I mean, of course, just for brief stints at places like this. Somehow I can’t seem to let go of myself entirely.

For a person to be appropriate to serve as such a model, he or she needs to be highly out of the ordinary while possessing something that might be seen as a kind of template for humanity or for the age and must be purified via fiction until they reach the dimension of the symbol.

Misfortune can visit itself upon anyone. But when it comes to serious misfortune, we have a tendency to presume that, if it happens at all, it can only happen once in a lifetime.

Was this how the world revealed itself to his eyes, so open and unfettered? What would life be like to calmly face such a reality?

For a long time afterward, Rié would sometimes wonder why she had cried at that moment. All she could think in the end was that she had been profoundly psychologically unstable. It was as though her feelings about the circumstances of her life, including her sadness over the deaths of Ryo and her father, had been building up imperceptibly since her return until, with the addition of these last trifling drops of emotion, the surface tension had finally broken and it had all spilled out.

The only reason her guard didn’t immediately go up was that she had seen those sketchbooks. But hold on, what could he have meant by “be my friend”? It wasn’t clear to her what exactly she had consented to.

“As you can probably imagine, I was relieved. I wanted to save my father’s life, but the more I looked into the procedure, the more scared I got . . . And after his death, I realized that something inside me was broken beyond repair. So I cut off all contact with my family and left town. I wanted to get as far away as possible . . . I have no intention of ever seeing them again. This is the last time I talk about my family.”

The dead cannot call out to us. All they can do is wait for us to call to them. Except for the dead whose names are unknown. Uncalled by anyone, they sink ever deeper into solitude.

“Well, taste in music changes like everything else, but good memories stick with you.

The problem now was not who he was in the present but who he’d been in the past, and the solution he sought was no longer supposed to help him live but to help him figure out what sort of person to die as.

Most people spoke as though it was his problem, not theirs. And he felt the last of the tension he’d been holding on to fall away.

“Yes and no. Having a stigma means that you have some kind of trait that serves as the basis for discrimination, negative feelings, or even attacks. This irrespective of whether the trait is intrinsically bad or not. For example, the circumstances of your birth and rearing, a birthmark on your face, a criminal record. Everything else about you is ignored. All your multifaceted complexity is reduced to that one aspect. So if you’re Zainichi, that’s all you are and nothing more.”

It’s unbearable to have your identity summed up by one thing and one thing only and for other people to have control over what that is.”

“Nope. Three forward and four back is the way to go. You might not think so by looking at me, but I’m a megapessimist—true pessimists are full of cheer! That’s my personal motto. Our expectations are always low, so when something just a little bit nice happens, we’re on cloud nine.”

“Everyone makes this world out to be so much better than it actually is. They just see it the way they want it to be. That’s why they blame people for their misfortunes. Meanwhile, they’re not even satisfied with their own lives.”

When someone’s beating you up every day, the only way to accept that reality is to think of yourself as the one who’s doing the beating, or, like, tell yourself that getting beaten is inevitable, that you’re powerless to do anything about it.”

But personally, I don’t think he wanted to die. He was just at his wit’s end and needed some way to escape from it all.

“But Makoto didn’t want to be champ. He just wanted to be a normal person . . . He just wanted to live a normal, quiet life. A boring life that no one would take notice of. That was his deepest, truest desire. Same time, he was torn ’cause he knew how hard the prez was trying to help him become champ.”

What point was there in fighting over a tragedy that hadn’t even occurred?

Individual effort was surely worthy of praise, but did it amount to anything more than having the good fortune to encounter the right people and events to orient you toward it?

“His goal, remember, was to free himself from that background and be accepted by society. Killing someone would have undermined everything he’d worked toward.”

I just don’t believe he was that sort of person.

No one can deal with their suffering on their own. We all seek someone else to be the conduit for our emotions. And . . . I probably seem gloomy all the time, so I can understand why you’d think I’m no fun to be around.”

“Whenever I went to the bar, I found myself waiting for him, wondering if he would ever return. Meanwhile, I was checking his Facebook and giving him lots of ‘likes.’ He looked super busy. So when he didn’t come back, I invited him out.”

“It’s not his job that’s the issue . . . ,” she said. “He has a wife and child. You may be surprised to hear this, but I’ve always had a no-married-man policy.” “I don’t see why that should surprise me.”

“I’m being serious here! I’m in my forties and I’m still single and here I am, ready to stoop to that in the end . . . He’s not just busy. He seems to have a rich, fulfilling life and he’s never shown any interest in me . . . To tell you the truth, I’ve been a mess for the past six months. Such a mess that I’ve been wondering what’s come over me—and at this age too!”

There is a certain kind of loneliness that can only be soothed by finding yourself within the tale of another’s trauma.”

“Once the truth came out, they’d have to renew their love,” she said. “I mean, it’s not as if you love someone once and that’s it. You renew your love again and again over the long haul, through everything that happens along the way.”

“Love for another might remain the same love even as it keeps on changing. Or perhaps we can go further and say that love persists precisely because it changes.”

“If you cut off your relationships and move to a different place, the memories just fade naturally—I mean, if you hate your past, trying to forget will get you nowhere. You can’t erase it. You’ve got to overwrite it. Cover it over with someone else’s till it’s beyond recognition.”

“Even if I become homeless, I will never meet with the people in that family. Whatever the census records might say, can’t we let ‘Daisuké Taniguchi’ rest in his grave? Misuzu is the only exception. I can’t tell you how long I’ve wished that I could see her again. When I imagine myself on my deathbed and think who I’d want to be there, it’s her. Just her. That scene keeps popping into my head. Pretty dumb, I know. You met her, didn’t you?”

From the perspective of natural selection, was it more advantageous for the child to resemble the parent? Was it because of such resemblance that the parent raised the child with great care, as though they were the parent themselves?

For both Narcissus and Hara had wanted to depart from their bodies. If this had been possible for Narcissus, he would have been able to love himself, whereas Hara wanted to become someone else, to love another, and to be loved by that other. And yet ultimately, perhaps, by becoming a stranger, Hara too had sought a way to love himself from the very beginning—to love not just the proper noun “Makoto Hara” but the person that should have been.

Perhaps they too, like such mythical figures—whether in the throes of sorrow, driven by desperation, or pressured by others—had been forced to transform into a different being, some finding love and happiness, others tumbling further from grace.

In the midst of this unfolding time, did he contemplate the duration from his birth until that moment?

Strange that it had never occurred to him before, but Kido realized how much he wished they could have met.

On his own, Yuto had discovered a method for coping with the ordeals of life that she would never have been able to recommend or even think of herself.

Maybe his intention was simply to let her know about the deep wounds in his heart. After all, even if you misrepresented the cause, an injury was an injury, and pain was pain. Though such distortions would, of course, only confound efforts to find the right treatment.

Did love even need the past? She wanted to say no. And yet, if she was honest with herself, she suspected that she would not have been capable of embracing a partner with such a tortured history at a time when grieving her own losses and raising Yuto had absorbed all her energy—ultimately, there was no way to know. But the fact was that, thanks to Makoto’s lies, they had fallen in love and she had been blessed with Hana.

“Now I understand why he was . . . so nice to me.” “Why?” “I think Dad . . . he did for me what he wanted his father to do for him . . .”

She decided that those three years and nine months had been happy for her as well, so happy that her memories of that time and everything that flowed from it might just content her for the rest of her life.