A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

I told him I was a novelist. He hadn’t heard of me and seemed embarrassed by that fact, which made me ashamed in turn, an all-too-common occurrence.

“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.

Novelists, whether consciously or unconsciously, are always on the lookout for people that can serve as models for their novels. That is, we eagerly await the serendipity of someone like Meursault or Holly Golightly appearing out of the blue one day. 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.

“Father only went to heaven a little bit early to keep Ryo company,” drawled her mother, who truly believed such things. “He followed after that boy so as he won’t worry till you’re ready to go yourself. That’s Father, alright.”

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.

His doubts about whether this was truly the right path had never completely left him, but he went on looking to the future, telling himself that the person he was meant to be would be realized through the profession he had chosen. In other words, he had asked who he was in order to live, and on the basis of what he discovered had found hope as well as fear.

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.

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.”

“My issue is that I have all these problems that I want to find practical solutions to. But whenever I start to think about them, I become nauseous. I get this excruciating sense that my existence is radically insecure. And . . . for whatever reason, investigating the person I just told you about takes my mind off it. I don’t really understand it myself. But the result is that I’m able to get in touch with my life indirectly through someone else’s. And I’m able to think about the things that I need to think about. There’s no way for me to do this directly. My body rejects it every time I try. That’s why I said it’s sort of like reading a novel. No one can deal with their suffering on their own. We all seek someone else to be the conduit for our emotions.

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

“I’m sure we all have an infinite number of possible futures. Only, it’s difficult for each of us to realize what those are ourselves. I’m certainly no exception. If I were to pass the baton to someone at this point, they might be able to lead my life better than I ever would have.”

“You never think about the old days?” “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.”