At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

Listening to a musical theme develop, you come to see that it contained a certain potentiality all along. Once you follow it to the end, the theme never sounds the same again.

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.

“Free will is necessary to have hope for the future. People need to believe that there is something they can do to make a difference. Right? But at the same time, free will increases their remorse over the past. They feel there must have been something they could have done. Sometimes, a belief in destiny is comforting.”

A person could go mad trying to figure out who to blame or thank for their unhappiness or happiness.