I was born in Suginami, but we moved to Tsudanuma in Chiba Prefecture when I was small, and I grew up there. The neighbourhood was full of white-collar families just like ours. My sister was always top of her class; she couldn’t stand not being the best and didn’t step one inch outside her sphere of interest. She never—not even once—took our dog for a walk. She graduated from Tokyo University law school and passed the bar exam the following year, no mean feat. Her husband is a go-getter management consultant. They live in a four-room condo they purchased in an elegant building near Yoyogi Park. Inside, though, the place is a pigsty.
I was the opposite of my sister, not caring much about studying or my grades. I didn’t want any grief from my parents, so I went through the motions of going to school, doing the minimum amount of study and homework to get by.
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The rest of the time I played football and sprawled on my bed when I got home, reading one novel after another. None of your typical after-hours cram school, no tutor. Even so, my grades weren’t half bad. At this rate, I reckoned I could get into a decent college without killing myself studying for the entrance exams. And that’s exactly what happened.
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I started college and lived by myself in a small apartment. Even when I was living at home in Tsudanuma I hardly ever had a heart-to-heart conversation with my family. We lived together under one roof, but my parents and sister were like strangers to me, and I had no idea what they wanted from life. And the same held true for them—they didn’t have any idea what kind of person I was or what I aspired to. Not that I knew what I wanted in life—I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature, but history. I didn’t have any special interest in history, but once I began studying it I found it an engrossing subject. I didn’t plan to go to grad school and devote my life to history or anything, though my adviser did suggest that. I enjoyed reading and thinking, but I was hardly the academic type. As Pushkin put it:
All of which didn’t mean I was about to find a job in a normal company, claw my way through the cut-throat
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competition, and advance step by step up the slippery slopes of the capitalist pyramid.
So, by a process of elimination, I ended up a teacher. The school is only a few stations away by train. My uncle happened to be on the board of education in that town and asked me whether I might want to be a teacher. I hadn’t taken all the required teacher-training classes, so I was hired as an assistant teacher, but after a short period of screening I qualified as a proper teacher. I hadn’t planned on being a teacher, but after I actually became one I discovered a deeper respect and affection for the profession than I ever imagined I’d have. More accurately, really, I should say that I happened to discover
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Still the basic questions tugged at me: Who am I? What am I searching for? Where am I going?
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The closest I came to answering these questions was when I talked to Sumire. More than talking about myself, though, I listened attentively to her, to what she said. She threw all sorts of questions my way, and if I couldn’t come up with an answer, or if my response didn’t make sense, you’d better believe she let me know. Unlike other people she
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and, at the same time, to myself.
We used to spend hours talking. We never got tired of talking, never ran out of topics—novels, the world, scenery, language. Our conversations were more open and intimate than any lovers’.
