346-346 - Tumblr blog

[346-346]

To be continued is what he thinks.

I found a draft of an article I wrote in mid-March under the tentative heading "What it means to live" in the "Create New Article" section, and I had written up to the second paragraph, so it's not very coherent or anything. I don't understand myself, especially the first half. It was a long day. I feel as if a lot of things have been sucked out of me.

The Kesennuma correspondence department has now been transformed into a super comfortable space for the junior staff. The old, old bookshelf was the root of all evil.

　I.

　He was living alone in Kesennuma, and for the first time, he closed the door and went to do his business. The ceiling he looked up at was awfully high. It seemed to be closed by the wind that blew in. It is his custom not to turn on the lights, but the light leaking in through the cracks is warm.

　It will soon be spring. The water leak that he had been watching over the winter, thinking it might be due to the anti-freeze protection, seemed to be just an old screw that had become stupid.

　It reminded him of the butcher he saw last night, the owner of the butcher shop, who was knocking his foot-wipe mat against a telegraph pole, floating the dust away. To live is to expel, he thinks. The sound of the toilet seat running echoes in the dimly lit private room.

　The season has suddenly turned to June. Whether he felt the breeze or not, May had gone with the wind. It was his nostalgia. On the old, hard chair of a press room in prefectural police club, he reminisced about his days in Kesennuma. To live is to look back, he thinks. Where will he go now that the seasons have overtaken him?

　II

　A young woman's voice can be heard through the walls as she checks for a police report of a fertilizer fire in the countryside with a call. The heat in the back of his eyes won't leave his head. He doesn't even know what the election's for, just waiting for the right moment. The fact that he practiced playing such a song this morning was a source of emotional support now.

　Before long, the various energies in his mind stagnated and went back to the depths of his flesh. His roommate, who attended boxing classes, showed no interest in Tenshin's fight, which was considered the fight of the century, but when he asked the roommate a few days later if it had come up in class, the roommate nodded with a laugh. He and the roommate shadowboxed and said goodbye.

　III.

　He heard a podcast in the car that talked about how thinking about unimportant things had helped a speaker use his time better. Before that, everything seemed important, the man said. Decadent as he was, he had a habit of questioning society from the ground up. In the frame of not being important, the company and industry he belonged to seemed far less so. He was about to realize the benefits he had received so far. He knew that it would not hit him until he just got away from it as well.

　The irony, he thought, was that when one is tired of people and tired of society, the solution, however, lies in society and people.

　IV

　If the tendency to think is determined when we are small, but the atmosphere changes by what flows through that pathway from day to day, he never thought much of the people who lived here as attractive.

　Talking late into the night with O, his successor at Kesennuma, it seemed that he, too, had chosen this company, partly through the influence of his parents. He told me that he had not been attracted by the TV station's personnel department's advice to pursue what was fun.

　Mr. O was in frequent contact with a friend who had chosen the TV station.

　The friend told him that truly interesting things happen through interactions between people, but in the process of making TV program proposals, they are packed into a conference room and present a number of ideas to their superiors. This friend told O that O should be blessed to be a reporter and that the only time he could observe people was in Odaiba during his lunch break and on the monorail on his way to work, and also that O should know how lucky O was to be able to handle the topic of human death.

　O laughed and said that he had the mindset of reporting the death of a person like just following some format. Now that he thinks about it, he said, the HR department's words about only thinking about fun things sounded appealing, but in light of his friend's story, he concluded that no matter where you are, the grass is always greener on the other side... and then O showered and drove off to the mayor's press conference at 8:30 AM in the morning. Left alone after all, he took one big breath of fresh air at the view of nature. A beautiful river and mountains, which he had been unconsciously gazing at for a year and nine months when he lived there.

　VI

　The vanishing point still did not float into the view. He still had possibilities. He even wondered if he could contact Bob Green, whose works he had read yesterday. But he knew very well that the first thing he would do that afternoon would be to edit the articles of Ayame and JR written by his juniors.

　His mind had been closed since he had received the call from the desk telling him to stop fluffing up, you son of a bitch. He secretly and surely felt that the South American breeze that had been burrowing deep inside his body had begun to blow again.

　vii

　He was not suited to be a coordinator, of course, he thought. The desire to quench his parched throat by munching on "eating dried fish" filled and receded like a wave.

　He was still in the press room of the Prefectural Police Club. The voices of people across the wall seemed to be recording the noise and playing it all back at once. His mind seemed lonelier than when he lived alone, as he wondered what he should look like going home.

　The passive and the active, and in the middle is the middle voice, an adventurer once said in his book. To live, he thinks, is to be continue...

To be continued…., he murmured. Gazing at the head of an anchovy, drowned in air, inside a plastic pack labeled "domestic material”, for such a long time.

[346-346]

Things I think when I think about the anchor

I am here for what is called a social department training. There are some people who look decent. But I still heard the sound of a rat trap. I will probably never understand what the fun is in writing a news story and criticizing someone. And without any humor at all. Maybe that's the point, I think now. . I was in a good mood and asked her a lot of questions, but I still felt a whiff of something that was essentially different from me, and I was not sure what I was supposed to be excited about. I may have been looking for someone who is exciting to talk to, and I may have been far from perfect from their point of view, but I wonder if that is partly due to our compatibility. Everyone is under the company's rules and curses, and is always trying to find a way to get along in the company, and is always happy or sad at the company's evaluation, no matter where they go or what kind of organization they belong to. And so it is in the family unit. Originally, I wanted to be a company employee in order to acquire a semblance of common sense rather than my eccentric father, but I was still a child of a frog, and my roots were not the right one for being a company worker. There were people who would tell me that you would follow a career path that would surprise you and that you would be happy with, making a truly innocent face, but I couldn't quite figure out what would be left in the end. I also think that the idea of just leaving it behind in your life might be ridiculous to begin with. It is a big story. The peasants who worked in the manors had no idea of leaving anything behind, and I think it is very difficult to break the curse of modernity then. In Japanese, freedom is consists with two Chinese characters which means depending on your self, and Japanese word "我がまま" means selfish with also two Chinese characters that means being yourself. In other words, being a company employee means living for a few decades, advocating one's own wishes and realizing them in balance with the company's logic.

And in terms of significance or meaning, which are the keys to work I think, it is also very tricky. I felt the significance, or rather the richness of life, in the background music of Bob Marley that made the women working in the coffee shop dance, rather than in the subway built by JICA in Vietnam. The Special Investigation Department, the courts, the police, the ministries, politics, the IRS, and dangerous bus stops are no match for bokumode kimimode! I was thinking about how they are living each day with a dried-up sensitivity. I think I may be one of them soon!

And I had quite a few opportunities to talk with my father over the past few days, and when I heard that he used to draw only on the edges of a blank sheet of construction paper when he was a child, I thought, "I see".

He was not in agreement with his acquaintance who wanted to study the current reclamation of Tokyo Bay and its impact on the environment, but he was rather interested in the idea that bombing the small mountain in Chiba with an atomic bomb and creating tons of sands to fill up the ocean. Or the Aoba Street in Sendai is actually curved like a beak right in front of the station, and that is why some politicians wanted it to be straight. He spent all hours of the day researching the history of the city plan, which split the Diet in two, using his computer and reading newspaper articles from the past. He has been saying that he can't read fiction or literatures for some time now, but what he is looking for is a collection of real-life pictorial images, and since there is no attempt to read the human mind involved, my mother and sister complain about him. That's how it happened.

I have recently come to strongly believe that my father's fondness for newspapers may have influenced me, either unconsciously or consciously, to enter this business: newspaper. I feel I have not yet achieved true independence in a way.

Living on your own is difficult and impossible, but I believe that becoming mentally independent from the things that have protected you is one of the most important things you need to do in your 20's. It is a personal, but certainly critical, issue that will affect your self-esteem and self-confidence, and can change the way you perceive the rest of your life. Someone sang looking at the high sky, "I am both protected and bound".

Late at night in a hotel in Tokyo, I lie naked with no change of clothes, my shirt washed on the washbasin with shampoo by my side. 5%. My cell phone is nearly out of charge. The air purifier is rattling, trying to filter and clean the city air, but the air coming out smells a bit stale. Will tomorrow be a good day? I don't mind walking down the wide business street at a brisk pace, wearing my favorite leather shoes. I just don't like building streets, and I don't think I'm going to be very interested in the same kind of buildings. So it goes. Everyone decorates their nails, wears what they like, some learn about history, some work to get the big news. More or less.

I wonder if getting in and out of the company would be better, or if that hurdle were a little lower. It may still take me a little while to get to sleep today, as there were many times when I talked with them, but at the end of the day I was still confronted with the fact that we don't fully understand each other.