An attempt at autobiography: from childhood to adolescence（１）

In writing my autobiography, I have decided not to shy away from the dark reality of my own life, but to confront it head-on. Looking back, I must admit that my childhood and adolescence were extremely lonely. My father worked on Sundays, so he rarely took me out. In junior high, I became friends with a classmate named U. He felt sorry for me for not going anywhere, so he took me to his relatives in Ikoma during summer vacation. During elementary school, I went on "field trips" alone to the children's park or a small hill in the suburbs. Even during New Year's, the house was always gloomy, and I remember being trapped in a cold room, snowbound, and enduring the long winter ahead. On the rare occasions when I was taken to a department store, I was happy to receive Abekawa mochi (rice cakes) to eat when I returned home. The siblings next house each had their own celebrations for Hinamatsuri and Tango no Sekku, but my brothers had none. The toy gun I begged for was a whole digit more expensive, so even when my mother told me it was out of my reach, I refused to give up. School was fun. I think many of my teachers were very talented. I didn't have much to do, so I had no choice but to study. I think that was my salvation. What ultimately saved me was when I entered high school and started reading the complete works of world literature. I became engrossed in absorbing the idea that there was another world outside of reality. If I had only known the real world, I think I would have been helpless and just let chance take me by storm in my dark house, getting by day to day.

 

When I was 13 or 14, I didn't know anything but myself. I may never have encountered other people. The comfortable environment of elementary school forced me to shave my head and become a boy, which distanced me from girls. There were always girls around me in elementary school. They weren't friends, but I felt like they cared about me in some way. But when I entered middle school, that feeling disappeared. I built walls around myself to block out the world around me, and shut myself away. I enjoyed school. I studied according to the schedule, and during recess I killed time by walking around the school. Occasionally I would mess around with classmates and run around, but most of the time I was alone. I didn't take the initiative to join their group.

 

I was remembering myself as a junior high school student. The time when a sense of self emerges seems to overlap with my time in junior high school. Perhaps this is because the environment changes when I enter junior high school, and coming into contact with classmates who are completely different from those in elementary school creates an opportunity for me to confront myself. While my elementary school classmates were similar to each other, in junior high school I'm constantly made aware of the differences, and in some cases I felt overwhelmed.

 

In my junior high school days, there were what we would call bullies. They were big and good at fighting, or they were normal-sized but bony and sturdy. In elementary school, I was a gentle boy who blended in naturally with the girls and played with them, but for some reason, I felt a sense of affinity with delinquent boys like them. I was a bit of a bravado, and looking back, I think I may have been trying to get close to those who were stronger. I never got to the point of being forced to steal by older delinquents like in "Demian," but some of my classmates had families with ties to the yakuza, or were like younger brothers who would leave when there was a fight. There was also a wild boy who came from a so-called institution, and for some reason, I remember going to those institutions to play.

 

I guess I was just naturally drawn to people who were not only strong but also had a personality that made me attracted to those who were extremely strange. But even though I would approach some of these slightly dangerous classmates and alumni, I never became friends with them. They probably also felt uncomfortable around a "respectable" boy like me. However, I did become good friends with one of the delinquents, whose father was a teacher at school. He would go out to fight, but he also had a playful side that tried to impress people, and I think that somehow made him feel at ease. I continued to have casual contact with him until I got married.

 

***

 

I remembered that my longing for overseas travels stems from my immersion in American pop music during my junior high school years, and I listened to hits from that time on YouTube. PPM's songs resonated with me even today. The world was so small back then. With almost nowhere to go, I stayed indoors. Especially during the winter, when I couldn't go skiing, I absorbed music to the fullest. My room had a low, dark, attic-like ceiling, but it wasn't cramped. I felt so alone and cocooned in my own world that I probably distanced myself from the world's happenings. At the time, the world was in turmoil—the Vietnam War, the May 1940s in Paris, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution—but these events had no impact on my rural town. I was too young to absorb these happenings and had no knowledge of how to understand them. During my summer vacation in my third year of junior high, I lived in a provincial city, growing up in a craftsman's family and not knowing how to play. I avoided the invitations of my delinquent friends and instead spent my time stoically studying. My parents worked nonstop, even on Sundays, so I ended up being left to my own devices. I think I bought a thick study guide for the five main subjects during the summer holidays and studied every day. Perhaps it paid off, as my grades improved steadily thereafter, and I was able to raise my high school of choice. I then took the entrance exam for a school that allowed me to be in the top three of my class, and I was accepted.

 

After passing the exam, I abandoned my stoic study habits and devoted myself to the complete works of world literature. When I imagine my life after retirement, the first thing that comes to mind is "reading." The reason I chose "reading" is because I felt I wouldn't be able to read as much as I wanted until I retired. I felt that the only way to indulge in what I call "reading immersion" was to leave my company. Conversely, I'd even looked forward to retirement in order to experience the environment and mental freedom it brought. There was a time in my life when I fully enjoyed this "reading immersion" and "mental freedom." It was during my high school years. I hated studying for entrance exams and spent all my time reading books. For me, this was a period of voracious reading. While writers often talk about their experiences of voracious reading in their youth, I didn't read as much as they did, and the career I chose had nothing to do with writing, so as you can guess, it was a fairly standard course of voracious reading. In other words, I devoured the complete works of world literature from start to finish. The collection contains many relatively long novels, and my reading preference for long novels stems from my reading experiences at the time. I began with Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," followed by Hermann Hesse's "Under the Wheel" and "Narcissus and Goldmund," Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," Tolstoy's "Resurrection," Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," "The Adolescent," "The Idiot," and "Demons," Romain Rolland's "Jean-Christophe" and "Enchanted Souls," Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Reverie of the Solitary Walker," Camus's "The Stranger" and "The Plague," and Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence." I'm not sure if I read them in that exact order, but for about a year and a half, my high school life was spent reading these novels indiscriminately.