Novelist as a Vocation(40)

A society in which there is not enough room to escape produces deep problems in the educational arena, and necessitates new solutions. First of all we have to create a place where these solutions might be found.

What kind of place would that be?

It would be a place where the individual and the larger system can each move freely, and gently interact and negotiate with one another. In other words, a place where each person can freely stretch out their arms and legs and take a good, long breath. A place apart from hierarchy, efficiency, and bullying. Simply put, a warm, temporary shelter. One that anyone can enter and is free to leave. A serene middle ground between individual and community. Whatever position one takes up in it is left up to the person’s discretion. I’d like to call it a space of individual recovery.

It can be a small space at first. It doesn’t have to be anything big. A compact, handmade sort of place where all kinds of possibilities can actually be tried out, and if something works, it can become a model or springboard and then develop further. That space can gradually be extended even more. That’s the way I see it. It might take time, but I think that’s the most correct and rational way to go. It would be great if these spaces could spring up spontaneously everywhere.

But these spaces need to form organically. The worst-case scenario would be if an entity like the Ministry of Education tried to force it. Since what we’re advocating is a space of individual recovery, having the country institutionally try to solve the issue would be getting the priorities wrong, and it would end up a total farce.



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In my own case, when I look back to when I was in school, the biggest saving grace for me was having some close friends, and reading tons of books.

When it came to books, I greedily devoured a wide range, like I was busily shoveling coal into a blazing furnace. I was so busy every day enjoying one book after another, digesting them (in many cases not properly digesting them), that I didn’t have any time left to think about anything else. Sometimes I think that might actually have been a good thing for me. If I had looked at the situation around me more, thought deeply about the unnatural, contradictory, and deceitful things there and plunged right into pursuing things I couldn’t accept, I might have been driven into a dead end and suffered because of it.

Also, reading so widely helped to relativize my point of view, and I think that was very significant for me back when I was a teenager. I experienced all the emotions depicted in books almost as if they were my own; in my imagination I traveled freely through time and space, saw all kinds of amazing sights, and let all kinds of words pass right through my very body. Through all this, my perspective on life became a more composite view. In other words, I wasn’t gazing at the world just from the spot where I was standing, but was able to take a step back and take a more panoramic view.

If you always see things from your own standpoint, the world shrinks. Your body gets stiff, your footwork grows heavy, and you can no longer move. But if you’re able to view where you’re standing from other perspectives—to put it another way, if you can entrust your existence to some other system—the world will grow more three-dimensional, more supple. And I believe that as long as we live in this world, that kind of agile stance is extremely important. In my life this has been one of the biggest rewards of reading.

If there hadn’t been any books, or if I hadn’t read so many, I think my life would have been far drearier. For me, then, the act of reading was its own kind of essential school. A customized school built and run just for me, one in which I learned so many important lessons. A place where there were no tiresome rules or regulations, no numerical evaluations, no angling for the top spot. And, of course, no bullying. While I was part of a larger system, I was able to secure another, more personal system of my own.

The mental image I have of a space of individual recovery is exactly like that. It’s not limited just to reading. Even for kids who can’t adjust to the actual school system, the ones who aren’t especially interested in studying, if they are able to find their own customized space of individual recovery, and can discover something there that fits them in order to develop possibilities at their own pace, they’ll be able to naturally overcome the wall of the system. In order for this to happen, though, there has to be support from the community and family, and an understanding and appreciation of this way of thinking

Both my parents taught Japanese (my mother quit teaching after she got married), and they never complained about me reading books. They were a little displeased with my academic record, but never told me to stop reading all the time and study for exams. Or maybe they did sometimes, but I have no memory of it. That’s about the extent of what they would have said. I’m grateful to them for that.



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I’ll say it again, but I never had much affection for the “system” called school. I did have a few great teachers, and I did learn some important things, but this was nearly all canceled out by the fact that almost all the classes and lectures were boring. So mind-numbingly boring that when I finished school I thought I’d had a lifetime’s worth of boredom. But no matter how much I might think this, in our lives one boring thing after another flutters down at us from the sky, and wells up from the ground.

People who absolutely love school, and feel sad when they can’t go, probably won’t become novelists. I say this because a novelist is a person who steadily fills his head with a world of his own. When I was in class, I didn’t pay much attention to the lesson, and instead was lost in all sorts of daydreams. If I were a child today, I might have trouble fitting in and might end up one of the many kids who refuse to attend. But as I said, when I was young, truancy was not a trend yet, and I don’t think we even had the idea that not attending school was a choice.