At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

there were parents and children in the world who didn’t share a common language.

From now on, people would forevermore be creatures of exhaustion, distinguished from other animals by their continual state of fatigue. Caught up in the tempo of machines and computers, their senses buffeted by constant noise, people griped about daily life with piteous intensity before entering the complete silence obtainable only by death. For years, Makino had felt these things every time he went onstage.

My father told me I suffer from Death in Venice Syndrome, a disease he made up. It supposedly means “Growing suddenly tired of conforming to society at the onset of middle or old age and taking self-destructive actions with the intent of returning to one’s original self.” That’s me in a nutshell. lol. Over and over he told me to come back alive. With his words in mind, I try at all times to stay safe.

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.’

Such were the humbling effects of love. 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. The value of work and hobbies was the easy comfort they provided to lonely people who suffered from not being loved because they were not beautiful or lively. But such people forgot to dream fervently of becoming beautiful or lively in order to be loved. What was love if it failed to inspire the desire to be worthy of the one you cherished?

The smoothness of her return to the everyday world was a bit of an anticlimax; she crossed the threshold with barely any sense of unevenness. She had adapted with surprising ease to life in Baghdad with its lack of this and that, and found less pleasure than she had anticipated in returning to Parisian abundance. She found rather that she needed time to adjust to the excess around her. But being in a place where from sunrise to sunset there was never the sound of bombs quietly eased the lingering tension inside her. As her own feelings settled, she thought with pain of those she had left behind in Iraq.

For both of them, she thought, it could only have been their age. 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.

As a liberal professional woman, she had long kept an open mind about the possibility of life with or without children, but with forty looming, she had been leaning toward the desire to give birth.

She had arrived at a point in life where she did not necessarily require flaming passion, and she had visualized a peaceful future with Richard. What was important to her at that time was sharing a life with him and finding out whether or not he would make a suitable father.

Makino was happy. From that moment on, the light of love reached into every corner of his life, often surprising him and bringing a smile to his face. Happiness was having someone with whom to share all the everyday experiences of his world. When he was in Yoyogi Park back in Tokyo and saw children playing with toy guns that shot out bubbles, he immediately thought, I must tell Yoko.