Afterword

AFTERWORD

Beginnings

 

Erm. Most of the time, when people are ready to start something, they have already stuck their noses in pretty far. Take the phenomenon known as love at first sight—it does not actually begin at the chance meeting. First, that person’s heart has to be ready for such an encounter. That way, when he runs across someone who perfectly fits that form, he falls in love. This readiness is not always based on an ideal type, but can also be based purely on negative emotions, whittled down by his reactions to things he hates until a form is unconsciously constructed. When something appears that is the inverse of these negative emotions, the person falls as though the ground underfoot has crumbled. Thus, nothing in the world ever truly begins; there is always a certain amount of preparation beforehand.

 

To give an example, this happened when I was still a student. I was staring vacantly at the street below out the window of a train stopped at JR Yuraku-cho Station when I thought I saw a black shadow in the middle of the crowd. I’m nearsighted, and I soon lost track of whatever it was…I think. I was pretty out of it, so it might just have been my imagination. I spent most of my time rather dazed back then. But this thing was like a black mass rising directly out of the ground, like a yokai or spirit. Perhaps I never really saw it but just thought something like that might be neat.

 

At the time, I was already writing novels (during class… so consistently that even people I didn’t know knew that I was writing novels… incorrigible), so you might say I should have just written about it, but I was writing a different kind of novel at the time, and didn’t feel like it. My head was full of that one thing, and I never even looked at anything else. But looking back, I was interested in all kinds of things even then, and I did spend a lot of my time on unrelated matters. I had started listening to music, but I had no intention of connecting that interest to my writing. It was just for fun. That’s still partly true, even now. I did several other things that had equally little effect on my writing. They should have had everything to do with it, but I never noticed. And the shadow I saw out the window of the train was just one tiny piece of this.

 

So when I did decide to write about it, all the preparations I needed to write about it had already been made. I don’t really know how. When I started I was all revved up to begin, and I poured my energy into it. Yet, apparently, it had already started long ago. Apparently everything works that way. Even if you fail constantly, if you end up slamming your face into the wall over and over, you are already starting something, and no matter how fruitless and depressing it might seem to be, even if it really is sad, nothing can stop it from starting. Even if nothing lies ahead of you but darkness.

I think.

 

This looks optimistic, but it really isn’t.

Oh well.

 

BGM “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning” by THE SMASHING PUMPKINS