At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

Both were around forty, an age of peculiarly delicate anxiety. Whether they envisioned the bright hustle and bustle of their lives continuing or coming to an end, they felt dispirited.

Nothing is as tedious as the romance of others, but in their case it was different.

“People think that only the future can be changed, but in fact, the future is continually changing the past. The past can and does change. It’s exquisitely sensitive and delicately balanced.”

Knowing that the number thirty would steadily shrink made his remaining time seem neither abstract nor abundant.

A half century ago, had Tokyo been so quiet? Not just Tokyo . . . Had the world known such silence?

Music had to offer something that made you willing to listen, even at the sacrifice of such beauty.

Not only noises but images, smells, tastes, perhaps even the warmth of others . . . all of it rushing at them in a mad free-for-all, each bit screaming its presence. And society, still unsatisfied, crammed in yet more, until one’s very sense of time was destroyed. It was unbearable, human exhaustion.

From now on, people would forevermore be creatures of exhaustion, distinguished from other animals by their continual state of fatigue.

A concert hall, before it held music, was a place enclosing sheer silence within its walls. A refuge for silence found nowhere else in society, nor in the natural world.

But in that very moment, music should confront the beauty of silence—of death—should it not? The life force! The joy of being alive: Beyond that, what more did music even need? But the life he was now seeking to refine, amid the clamor of the everyday world, was gasping for breath.

He and Yoko had met only once. What if someone asked him whether he knew her? He wasn’t even sure he was entitled to call her a friend. And yet his admiration for her and his sense of closeness to her were stronger than ever. That evening, she had smiled teasingly as she said, “You did apologize, didn’t you? To the man on the bullet train.” He couldn’t forget the look on her face then. If she had suffered an injury that would require lifelong care, he even thought he could devote himself to her. But it was crazy to let his emotions run away like this, he told himself, shaking his head.

He didn’t want anyone to know about his situation, and at the same time, he wanted to be understood.

Only in the darkness did she feel a little bit safe.

I feel fear, but more than that, it’s just a mystery to me why I’m alive in this moment.”

Truly our times resemble in strangeness all others that history mentions, in tradition sacred or profane. In times like these, whoever has lived yesterday and today encounters so many events piled together that he has already lived years.’

“His gift is like . . . a paper airplane that God folded and let fly just for fun. It appeared high in the heavens one day and just keeps on going, flying and flying and never falling to earth. The line it traces is a thing of beauty.”

Meanwhile, in the depths of this dark, deathlike silence, people imprisoned by violence carried on their lives with bated breath.

What if, instead of getting in that taxi, she’d told him she wanted to be with him all night? What would have happened? The bold suggestion set her heart pounding. If, before returning to Baghdad, she had done more than surround herself with beauty—if she’d lain in his arms—how different would her life be now?

“You’re in love,” Philip had said. That one uncalled-for remark was working on her emotions, propelling them in a direction from which there could be no turning back.

There is no way to pull myself together except to put everything into words, and yet I am struck more than ever by the difficulty of writing about myself to myself.

Deep within him, a light shone as bright as day, a brightness that he found blinding.

As they grew older, people distanced themselves from love not so much from a diminishing of passion, the desire to love, as from a dulling of the clear and anguished self-awareness of adolescence, the fear that they were not lovable.

Every romance has one or two such feigned coincidences. And often, the beloved dimly suspects the truth.

Young people’s hearts were extremely combustible. Once lit, the flame of passion would spread with the abandon of wildfire, out of control. If the combustible portion of the other’s heart similarly caught fire, the two had to become lovers, if only to escape their misery. Romantic love thus could not be expected to endure. At some point, the flames of passion had to quiet down into a more lasting warmth. For youth, that sort of love amounted to romance gone flaccid. No matter how blessed a marriage based on such love might be, there would inevitably be a pinch of resignation mixed in.

Her life was moving forward smoothly. And then came Makino—a flame igniting the heart she’d thought had outgrown passion, engulfing it all at once in a fire that only grew ever more consuming.

“I clearly heard not only the laments of nymphs mourning the death of the great Pan, but also sighs of relief.”

The underlying sadness of life.

“I suppose it was after Romanticism that beauty became so weighed down by expectation. Even ugliness has come under its umbrella. But beauty isn’t only an agent of expression. It has equal power to enable us to turn our eyes away momentarily from the horrors of this world, doesn’t it?”

All sorts of things punch holes in our destiny, I think. Without there being anything we can do about it. And sometimes it may be a bullet.

“Your existence has punched a hole in my life. Or rather, it’s embedded deep within me.”

Every time he imagined the conversations they might be having, he closed his eyes in agony.

Loneliness, when it came down to it, was the awareness of your utter lack of influence in the world—knowing that you could and would have zero influence on either your contemporaries or on future generations.

Talking to her made him feel hopeful that he himself might change.

Perhaps the entire day had been leading up to this performance. A fragment from the beginning of the elegy crossed his mind: “For whose pleasure are they wrung by an insatiable will?” This beautiful evening was drawing to an end. What might lie ahead?

People are spurred to act less by eager dreams of a happy future than by anxiety over the danger, remote or otherwise, of remaining stuck in the status quo. Regret still lay far off, but already the waters of that chill lake were lapping at her feet.

To be wanton meant not merely to be extravagant but somehow to lose track of one’s fundamental being in the joy of complete abandonment to the other—a joy that knew no bounds. She sensed that now perhaps she was being swept into the sensual turmoil of Death in Venice Syndrome.

Conventional doubts arose, making him fear that that cluster of delightful hours might be something like a school of sweetfish, able to survive only in clean water and certain to die if swept downstream into the muddy currents of everyday life.

He realized that for the world to overflow with meaning, it couldn’t exist only for oneself.

the monthlong postponement gave her a twinge of anxiety. She felt a disjunction similar to the optical illusion where train tracks stretching into the distance appear to converge at the vanishing point, but as station after station goes by, the view ahead never changes, and the parallel rails of course never meet. What appears in the present moment to be an inevitable convergence is, in the end, only an illusion.

People could neither dream the dreams they wanted nor avoid those they didn’t want.

I know my own worthlessness better than anyone.

She felt as if she were wandering in a maze with any number of exits. Compared to a maze where every wrong path led to a dead end and forced you to retrace your steps, a maze with no dead ends and only different exits was far crueler.

The idea of Mitani’s presence in Makino’s life took root within her, sprouting and producing a succession of bright blossoms like a morning glory in summer, wrapping its tendrils around her emotions. None of the blossoms lasted long, but the number of new buds did not decline. The blossoming looked likely to last all summer—until she saw Makino again.

I have always loved you, but I have no confidence that I always will.

“As if a hole had opened in one’s heart.”

The hole in her heart was filled with unceasing loneliness.

“What do you mean? There’s nothing to be ashamed of!” In that previous self, she now perceived the arrogant dazzle of one blessed with good health.

Try as she might to banish the dark fear, it rose continually in her mind.

He felt he ought to be angry, but somehow he couldn’t be.

‘That which is not esteemed will be forgotten.