An attempt at autobiography: from childhood to adolescence（４）

It was right around the time of my first summer in college. I was sketching at the bird park next to the university when someone approached me, and by chance, I was on the verge of getting a girlfriend. Looking back, it seems a bit wasteful, but I was a hard-nosed guy, so I decided to approach a group of people at university who I considered to be activists. (I was clumsy at doing things simultaneously.) I somehow couldn't bear the emptiness and felt an urge to enter into a passionate relationship with the world. Yukio Mishima committed suicide when I was in my second year of high school, the United Red Army's Asama-Sanso incident occurred in my third year, and Kozo Okamoto's Tel Aviv shootings occurred in my first year of college. A dangerous atmosphere permeated the air of the time. I once read a former Zenkyoto member recalling how he had drifted away from the movement during this period, but looking back now, in my case, rather than drifting away, I was drawn closer to it, fueled by a fantasy of incomprehensible violence. At the very least, I sensed something different from the violence of the IS. (The violence happening today only feels brutal.) I think I accepted my shock with this realization: Things are happening in the world that I can't even imagine, I've known nothing about it until now, and I want to learn more about what's happening now and understand it.

It's not that I set out to research Yukio Mishima or the United Red Army. I wasn't interested in what they were claiming or the events that had led up to it. It's just that their motives were different from those of ordinary robberies or murders, and they were connected to an ideology that they were willing to risk their lives to achieve. It's not that I was interested in the ideology, either. Rather than the ideology itself, I was interested in the "singularity"—the source of the energy that led to breaking through the everyday. I think it lay in the abstract nature of the times that caused it to happen. Perhaps it can be expressed as wondering why the sense of urgency existed in the times when I was adolescent.

I was at a dead end.

I was also at a time when I was unsure about my future career choice and was at an impasse. I remember feeling vaguely sad about everything, for some reason I couldn't understand it. Just like how everything about Utada Hikaru's debut album was sad. (Although I'm from a different generation than Utada, when I heard her comment about why she felt so sad back then, I felt the same way. Incidentally, for my generation, the sadness of Yuming's "Hikoki Gumo" may be similar.)

Why was I so sad back then? My high school classmate A and I were separated as we went our separate ways, one in Tokyo and the other in Kanazawa. Since we didn't have a proper final goodbye in Kanazawa, I received a letter from him some time later. That day, as I was returning home in the evening from the art school I was walking to, I had a premonition that a letter would arrive, and sure enough, there it was in the mailbox next to my front door, and I felt a sense of certainty. The letter contained my Tokyo address and phone number. I've forgotten the rest of the contents, and I've also forgotten what kind of reply I wrote.

However, I have a vague, faint feeling that she was ashamed of her childish behavior up until then and was trying to convey to me that she had grown up and could treat me as an equal. Looking back, I think she probably felt that I had belittled her in high school and couldn't forgive that. She may have struggled to study for her entrance exams due in part to my fault, and was eager to make up for it by attending a cram school in Tokyo. Or perhaps she hadn't had the luxury of showing her true self in high school, but now that she was back to her normal self, she was trying to convince me to see that side of her. In response, I felt guilty for having distanced myself from her and ended our relationship because it was interfering with my entrance exams, and I think I apologized for unilaterally distancing myself from her without consulting her. (Perhaps memories of that time were gradually coming back to me...) When I first became involved in the student movement, I contacted her about a rally in Tokyo, and we ended up reuniting. When we first met in Tokyo, she often led the conversation, partly because I was unfamiliar with the city. When I went to eat at the cafeteria at the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo's Akamon Gate, I asked them if it was okay that I wasn't a University of Tokyo student, and they answered like a Tokyoite, saying it was totally fine.