A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

For many years, he had struggled to understand why his parents had to love his brother so much simply because he was the eldest male.

one is able to love someone in the present thanks to the past that made them the way they are.

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.

I’m afraid to die, he thought. The instant he died—and not a moment later!—his consciousness would cease, and he would be incapable of thinking or feeling anything ever again, leaving time to proceed with no connection to him, passing solely for the sake of the living. Trying to imagine this pushed Kido’s mind to its limit. Here he was, alive today, with a world persisting for him, when the more than fifteen thousand people who’d lost their lives in the tsunami two years earlier could perceive nothing of what was occurring in the present. They had left no trace of anything substantial with which they might participate in it. Not in this world, and probably not in the afterlife or anywhere else . . . Kido’s fear of the same thing happening to him made him painfully sensitive to the minutiae of life.

All it might take to stir someone up in the midst of the everyday was the voice of fake news.

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.”

If not for the surrounding wall, the building might have been mistaken for a school, and Kido was reminded of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which he had read in university.

The very idea of them getting together was so unrealistic that he didn’t even treat it as a serious possibility. Nevertheless, there was something about her that irresistibly stirred up visions of what life might be like with her as his partner. He felt more comfortable with himself in their online communications than in any other context. And whenever he saw her picture on Facebook, with her happy-go-lucky vibe and joyful, spontaneous smile, he imagined the days passing with her by his side, wondering how everything might have turned out if he had married her and she had been Sota’s mother instead. Of course this was nothing more than a fantasy of an alternate life that, while possible perhaps in another world, could never have been a reality in this one.

The purpose of graphic design was to make people aware of the existence of something, whether an event or a commercial product or anything else.

But irrespective of capitalism and mass consumer society, didn’t art in fact originally function as publicity? For example, a blazingly vibrant sunflower in a flowerpot. A horse galloping across a prairie. A life of loneliness. The tragedy of war. Hatred borne inside. Loving someone. Being loved by no one . . . Couldn’t all artistic representation be thought of in the final analysis as an advertisement for these?

Yes, loneliness. He did not shy from this word to express the dark emotion that had been seething in his chest of late. It was a bottomless, middle-aged kind of loneliness that he never could have even conceived of when he was younger, a loneliness that saturated him with bone-chilling sentimentality the moment he let down his guard.

“If we are ever going to wipe away the evil of murder, then as a fundamental baseline condition, we need to reject the idea that it is acceptable to kill in extreme cases. It may not be easy, but I believe that that is what we should be aiming for. Offenders will surely never be forgiven, but the state should bear the blame for the social conditions underlying their crimes and take responsibility by providing substantial support to the victims, instead of feigning innocence and pandering to punitive sentiments. Whatever policy is chosen, my view is that the state must never descend to the same ethical lows as the evil of murder.”

If he had been asked whether he liked or didn’t like the peasants, Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a loss what to reply. He liked and did not like the peasants, just as he liked and did not like men in general. Of course, being a good-hearted man, he liked men rather than he disliked them, and so too with the peasants. But like or dislike “the people” as something apart he could not, not only because he lived with “the people,” and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also because he regarded himself as a part of “the people,” did not see any special qualities or failings distinguishing himself and “the people,” and could not contrast himself with them.

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.”

The myth of Narcissus was, of course, a story of unrequited love.

Did love even need the past?