KATANAGATARI 2

I’m sure you’re all familiar with April Fool’s Day, a.k.a. “All Fools’ Day.” Forget the person who came up with it. Whoever popularized this “lying free-for-all” accomplished quite the feat. What could be more brutal than a “lying free-for-all”? It’s hard to wrap your head around how you could make that part of normal life. From the little I’ve read about it, the day’s origins are shrouded in obscurity, but it makes you wonder. If someone tells you “it’s okay to lie,” you somehow start to tell the truth. Not so different how you can be incredibly excited to do something, only for somebody to say “Do it” and make you lose your steam. Turning things around, by designating April Fool’s Day as a “lying free-for-all,” you wind up saying, by extension, or in a roundabout sort of way, that lying on all other days is not okay. But this is where the slippery nature of lying factors in. If you don’t normally tell lies (meaning you’re not used to telling them), it’s easy to tell. Lying on just one day a year is harder than it sounds─not to sound ludicrous and claim that it demands a kind of discipline, but conceptually speaking, that’s not far off. If someone is constantly lying, the lies stop standing out, but the problem here is when somebody lies without realizing. Lies may stem from misunderstandings or mistakes, but sometimes the person saying them starts taking them for granted. In light of all that, there is not a soul on earth who doesn’t lie. Everybody tells at least one lie per day, but frankly, most of us tell more: so regularly and constantly that it would be fairer to count them by the minute. Who could see through all these lies? It would not only be unreasonable: but physically impossible. Which is why believing other people is, perhaps, essentially a kind of giving up. And that makes April Fool’s Day not a “lying free-for-all,” so much as a “lying free fall.” Although I have to say, the person who translated it into Japanese18 is even more incredible than the person who popularized it.