A Man

by Keiichirō Hirano

Rié was glad that her mother and her son had been forming a connection unbeknownst to her. Two people that she loved also loved each other without the need for her to mediate their affection. And sharing in their sadness and isolation, they were trying to soothe each other’s pain and assuage each other’s loneliness. For Rié, it was a mysterious joy, and the mere thought of what they might be talking about when she wasn’t around brought a ticklish warmth to her breast.

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? Nakakita, for example, was convinced of the perspective taken by recent biology that a person’s character was determined by the synergy between genetic and environmental factors and believed that the exclusionary dichotomy between nature and nurture was specious. It went without saying that he dismissed the assertion that everything is the responsibility of the individual as the pinnacle of folly. Kido was of exactly the same opinion.

Basically, Kido hated the very idea of collecting human beings into categories. That was the sole reason he found his Zainichi background bothersome. It should have gone without saying that some Zainichi would be good people and some bad, and there would be things about the good Zainichi that he disliked as well as things about the bad Zainichi that were good even if he didn’t know it.