A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

utterly neglected. The town lacked even the young people to spray-paint it with graffiti.

Whether you wanted to call it growing up or growing old, wasn’t hanging on to such innocence supposed to be against the rules?

Children developed entirely too fast, immediately outgrowing whatever seemed to define them as individuals.

There’s something about earthquake risk that just doesn’t stir you to act.

Not just earthquakes

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.”

As per the Civil Code, a child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally considered to be the child of the former husband. The law had become controversial of late because women, who, for example, divorced after suffering domestic violence and who had a child soon after with a new partner, sometimes refrained from submitting a notification of birth. This left some children to enter society without a family register.

Used mainly in the beginning for policing and tax collection, the family register was expanded over a millennium later in the Edo period when it became a tool for cracking down on Christianity.

This new family register was employed in the census for the purposes of conscription and tax collection, and the desire to avoid these led many to ditch or falsify their registers. “Some kids ended up without family registers when they were born out of wedlock and went unreported,” said Nakakita as he ate a slice of the Baumkuchen that someone had brought to share.

people were excluded from the spiritual body of the nation and became second-class citizens if they weren’t included in the family register.”

If such a system went unchallenged, a vicious cycle would emerge in which the blighted citizenry needed to be executed in ever greater numbers as the state slipped further and further into decline.

“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.

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 l...

dismissed the assertion that everything is the responsibility of the individual as the pinnacle of folly.

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.”