KATANAGATARI 1
AFTER(S)WORD
Well, regarding that, there are all kinds of ways of thinking about things, and no blanket statement is possible, but when someone does something wrong for instance, it’s not so easy to say what they could do to earn forgiveness. Not to mention the problem of pinpointing what we mean by such a vague idea as wrong, and defining where it starts and ends─but as a working definition, let’s call wrongdoing any action with a victim. Unless you’re a perfect person,6 in the normal course of everyday life, you’re going to wind up doing something wrong to somebody, even if it never hits the level of a crime. So how should we make up for these wrongdoings? There are going to be times where it isn’t good enough to apologize, or to be remorseful, or to suffer the same fate, because at the end of the day, asking for forgiveness is the epitome of arrogance. When you have a perpetrator and a victim, it certainly doesn’t mean no wrongdoing occurred just because the victim sees what happened with complete indifference and doesn’t even feel victimized, and a wrong is still a wrong even if the perpetrator is oblivious and shows no sign of compunction. Or rather, crime or not, no matter how we may regret or even forget the things we’ve done, they never go away, and if they get brought up for the rest of our lives, that doesn’t seem so unfair. Atonement and punishment are done for the victim’s sake, not our own, but we can’t seem to keep ourselves from mixing this up, and it’s depressing to think how humans, as a species, are unable to consider crime and punishment in anything but self-regarding terms. But that’s enough slapdash philosophy for one sitting. If you do something wrong, go ahead and apologize.
Thus ends the fourth of the twelve KATANAGATARI books. Yikes, I mean the third. Sento the Legion, a thousand swords in a single bunch. The fact that it’s only the end of one installment in a longer series makes all of these afterwords surprisingly difficult to write, but sluggish as these words may be, the story proper marches on. Sometimes I think thanking our illustrator, take, is the only solid reason for these commentaries, but just as there are times when saying sorry isn’t good enough, there are times when saying thank you isn’t good enough. Demonstrating gratitude is never easy, but for what it’s worth, I’ve tried.
Nine more books to go!
NISIOISIN
6 聖人君子 SEIJIN KUNSHI “saintly prince”