Afterword

Afterword:

 

The School in Boogiepop

These days, I rarely have them, but back in my early twenties, I often had dreams about high school. Dreams in which I was going to high school, not dreams about having gone. I’m talking about in the present tense, as a twenty something adult, putting on a uniform (the old kind with the clasp) and going to school. In the dreams, I knew clearly that I had graduated several years before, but I was pretending not to know and going anyway. Since it was a dream, this pretense was enough to fool my classmates. Not one of them ever noticed that I had no business being at school. Neither did the teachers. I sat in the corner of my class, in the dreams, thinking about how much I really shouldn’t be there.

The school in the dreams was not the Kanagawa Prefectural Noba High School that I had actually gone to. Rather, it was a school I had never seen. (For starters, Noba uniforms didn’t have a clasp; they were blazers.) Nevertheless, I knew all kinds of things about that school. To make a long story short, the setting for Boogiepop and Others, Shinyo Academy, is that school from my dreams, the only part of this novel that is fantasy. The rest is something different.

I think I failed miserably at being a teenage boy. I never once thought I was young, or had a future. (I often do now.) I never actively participated in class or anything else. I just sat there, wondering what I was doing there, and after I graduated, I wondered why I had spent so much time thinking about those sorts of things. I don’t particularly understand myself.

So, even now, I don’t really get the idea of going to school. I was twenty-eight when I wrote this novel, and over ten years have passed since I graduated. Even if I try to find the answer, I no longer have a school to go to, so the whole thing is permanently out of reach. It’s all too late now. It’s one of many, but this “what did I do in school?” question is a pretty big trauma for me. It’s like my first love that I never asked out. Augh! I was a dirty little angst-ridden idiot without a single thought for love. I imagine the reason behind the dreams is my conviction that I would be much better at being a high school student now.

Ultimately, school is a place where you have to be with others. That’s all. It ends without you ever really understanding much about each other, but even so, you bump into a lot of people and a lot of thoughts, and you still come back for more. Sadly, schools are not exactly set up to preserve that diversity. (Right, my readers in school?) I can’t help but think that’s a crying shame, but the entire world seems to work that way, and school isn’t that unique of a place in the world. That’s why, in my dreams, I’m always thinking, “God, I really hated that guy, but now I wish I’d known him a little better.” And I do all this while sitting there in the corner of the room.

(This is less of an afterword than a confession, isn’t it?)

(Ah, whatever.)

BGM “HEARTBREAKER” (live ver.) by Grand Funk Railroad.