Today was a day off. I went to a library and borrow the book I had reserved. It's Nobuhiko Kobayashi's "Born In Nihonbashi". I have not read his books often. When I had become a teenager, he was already a great writer. I might not be able to read his ones easily. Or I wanted to read fresher writers. Recently I read his books as "Far East Serenade" or columns about movies and books. They make me move. "Born In Nihonbashi" is also a great collection of columns.
That Nobuhiko Kobayashi writes the book "Life is from 51". I will be 47 this year but I couldn't imagine how the 47 can be when I was young. Once I was a heavy drinker and thought that I wanted to die at 40. I didn't want to show old and ugly myself, just wanted to stay beautiful and die soon. It might be influenced by Kurt Cobain's suicide. Reading Nobuhiko Kobayashi's articles, I am moved because they can't be written by young writing. The secret of them might be from the steady life. Can I reach this stage?
"Born In Nihonbashi" is the record of the great people he had met and in 2021 that corona panic still shook our society. It makes me silent because they can be read as "the final stage" of his life. But he doesn't show himself as a giant. He just lives as a citizen and watches TV and movies. He tries to speak what he has got from them. I don't want to say yes to all the things he says. But his positive attitude which he tries to stay actual tells me precious things. I want to borrow his old books from libraries.
Shintaro Ishihara had passed away and people start talking about his activities. Some of them praised his death. I can see how the feeling is but I don't want to throw away the precious things people must have and win at arguments or battles. I want to say "Cheers!" to the people who praise it. For me, the problem stays not in himself as a person, but in the system as mass media which lets him say hate speech or something wrong. I don't want to blame the sin, not the person... Is this "relativism" or "cynicism"?
