When I was suffering from a sense of emptiness after retirement

 As dawn breaks, I begin spending some time alone in the dimly lit room. Filled with time alone, even the simple routine of boiling water and making coffee feels exciting. Reading the newspaper or turning on the TV would ruin it. Being completely cut off from the outside world is a freedom. I loved the feeling of being enveloped in the room, neither cold nor hot, my body temperature and the air blending together. I briefly picture the lively morning atmosphere in Ulysses's "Tower," and mutter to myself that my wife is asleep, just like Molly. Listening carefully, I can hear the faint chirping of birds through the window. Morning hasn't yet begun. The children will soon be passing by my house on their way to school. Mr. Y's house, diagonally behind me, leaves early in the morning. My wife listens to the sound of their car in her slumber, but makes no attempt to wake up. It seems that slumbering is the best time for her. I woke up, got out of bed, and lingered in my room without turning on the lights. We savored the idle time until we had a simple breakfast together.

After 38 years as a salaryman, I felt nothing but amazed at how I'd endured it. The good thing was that I could receive at least a small employees' pension. Combined with my wife's pension, it seemed I could live a normal life barring a major accident. That sense of security was a spiritual asset to me now. As is often said, being a salaryman is a corporate slave, and looking back, I realized that individual ability is unnecessary; all you need is the skills of a corporate slave. Being overly sensitive leads to humiliation, so I even tried to become as insensitive as possible. I couldn't tolerate being caught up in emotions over pay disparities or perceived unfairness in personnel decisions, so becoming insensitive was the quickest way to deal with it. Quitting my job might have been wise, but I wasn't particularly skilled, so I got tired of it and just went with the flow. I became increasingly enslaved to the company, but I endured it, thinking it was better than the concentration camps. By "better," I meant that I received a small salary, social insurance, and a pension if I stayed until retirement age. So, as long as I worked as unremarkable as possible and had the body and mind to withstand the somewhat servile and harsh environment, I could stay at the company until retirement age. But I couldn't underestimate the company. For me, every day was a battle. As Ango Sakaguchi wrote, I believed that the most tragic thing wasn't falling behind and becoming poor, but losing self-confidence as a result. As long as I didn't give up, that was all that mattered. I think of my retirement as a time when I was finally freed from the harsh conditions and could breathe again.

My life has had some ups and downs, but now it's neither good nor bad, and is quite ordinary. But it takes something extraordinary to be satisfied with the ordinary. It's inevitable that a sense of dissatisfaction grows in the mundane everyday. Yesterday was one of those days when things were more different. There's a delicious soba restaurant in Bessho, a little way up the mountain in Kanazawa. My wife and I had handmade soba for lunch. I ordered duck nanban, and my wife ordered wild vegetable soba. It contained six slices of duck and was incredibly tender. The wild vegetables seemed to have been picked from the nearby mountains. The broth was delicious, and I added soba soup to my teacups and drank two cups. Satisfied, I left Bessho and drove to Guruguru Square in Okusa along the Sai River, parked my car, and took a stroll along the Sai Riverbank. I passed people running, walking, and strolling at just the right intervals. Time passed slowly. After walking for about an hour, I bought some cake and headed home. I had some strawberry pie with coffee. This strawberry pie, with its thin pastry and slightly softer strawberries than jam, pairs well with the fresh cream. Despite spending the afternoon like this, I found myself feeling somewhat dissatisfied when it was over. "Why? Maybe my heart has become too extravagant," I muttered. I wanted those dramatic events to return.

That was after I'd retired and still hadn't gotten used to the uneventful daily life.

I was the one who called her first. Since I called her at work, we only had a brief, businesslike conversation, and it seemed we had decided to email her about what we really wanted to talk about. That night, I emailed her on her cell phone, and we exchanged our computer email addresses so we could exchange longer messages. I called her because I really wanted to reminisce about the past. I thought the statute of limitations had passed and we could finally talk normally. Since emails aren't written, they probably can't be considered correspondence, but we exchanged emails almost every day for about a year. Around that time, the day before my mother was scheduled for surgery for a disease called macular degeneration, I stayed overnight at my parents' house and she sent me a concerned email on her cell phone. The email became heartwarming and intimate. There was actually a warmth to the words she wrote. It felt like it came from her own body heat.

She was the woman to whom I proposed marriage when I was 26. She was a classmate in my third year of high school, and although I ended up getting dumped, we had a long-distance relationship between Tokyo and Kanazawa. It's been over 40 years now, and she's just a memory, but through her image I rediscovered my own youth and felt the desire to reconstruct a fictional life. I knew that simply remembering the fulfillment of my youth was impossible, and that it would ultimately be a futile effort. But when I ask myself this question now, a voice tells me it wasn't a waste. Looking back, it seems inevitable that I ended up meeting her. Indeed, my life had returned to me. Meeting her made me realize how much my life as a salaryman had killed me, how much I'd lost sight of myself. She looked youthful and didn't seem to have been a long break, and traces of her youth remained. In other words, she retained something that hadn't changed. Just being exposed to her made me feel saved.

Looking back, the timing was terrible. Or rather, I had simply thrust my feelings into her without any regard for the timing. From her perspective, she had moved to Tokyo after graduating from high school and been away from me for a long time, so even if I had suddenly said something like that, she probably couldn't have imagined marrying me. At the time, she was under some kind of mental strain. She had been convinced that she had to get married. I wonder why. Now I can take as much time as I want to explore the reasons. After all, I have more than enough time now that I've retired.

The thought that if I had taken a little more time and dated her back then, our lives might have been different led me to boldly call her workplace 39 years after I proposed to her, when she was married and our eldest son was already an adult. I kept this a secret from my wife. She was still working before retirement. While she was at work, I was alone, trying to reminisce about my youth.

It was a bad idea to keep it a secret from my wife. I could have told her. When I was at the class reunion in Kanazawa and feeling nostalgic, I might have mentioned that there was going to be a class reunion in Tokyo soon. But given my wife's personality, I think she would have bluntly told me there was no need to go to a reunion in Tokyo. Because my wife's intuition is connected to her instincts, she knows there's something up when she senses something guilt in me. And I certainly felt guilty when I went to Tokyo. But at the time, I was tormented by the emptiness of retirement, and my own plans took over.

When I retired and felt lost and unsure of where I belonged, returning to my youth seemed like the right choice. I'm sure that many former office workers, like me, prioritized the company over the individual, working hard under the threat that there were plenty of others to replace them. Most people don't realize that they have already become strangers to themselves. I realized this. I knew it because I experienced the worst-case scenario that my own plans brought about, and I realized that I was valued. It was fortunately, unexpectedly, that I realized I hadn't been valued for a long, long time. To be accepted as a person, as a man. I finally realized this after causing pain to two women. When I realized that they had suffered for my sake, an overwhelming love and happiness welled up inside me, and I was able to gladly endure any mistreatment or punishment. At any rate, my emotions demanded it, and the pain I had inflicted was mine...