At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

“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.

“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.”

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.

In war, the question of who did what to whom can’t be ignored, but above and beyond that, there’s the perspective of humanity, don’t you agree? Things that human beings should and shouldn’t do, period. Making excuses by comparing yourself with others—I’m not as bad as the other guy; my country’s not as bad as theirs—that sort of relativism is just aggressors trading winks. It’s ugly. I can’t accept it. Victimhood in war is absolute, isn’t it?

You shouldn’t try to overanalyze things in your current state. The more you tell yourself that nothing so very terrible happened to you, the more your body may be protesting: ‘What do you mean? Look at these wounds!’ Once the circuit is set to issue that warning, it’s hard to undo.”

She didn’t think of herself as leading a selfish, sanctimonious life. But she couldn’t refute her husband’s assertion that she was too cold to know the happiness of loving and being loved.

Unreasonable as it might seem, experiencing the happiness that the dead and others would never know made survivors feel guilty.

Whether one was happy or unhappy, the question always remained: Why me? And in the absence of a clear answer, one couldn’t help wondering, Do I deserve this?

Certainly, the past could be changed. But could you change the past without also changing the present?