Notsudoru Nudoru

Translator’s Preface: This is my first time translating anything into English from Japanese so there are bound to be more than a few mistakes in this translation. I’m also pretty stupid so there may be parts where I have misinterpreted the meaning of a sentence and warped it into something completely different. But I think I’ve gotten the general gist of this thing correct. If you see any mistakes, just correct it for me.

The bothersome aspects of living aren’t new. If you don’t like that, then there’s no better idea than death. From the point of view of someone like me, who holds an abundance of free time such that he can do something like calm down and read a book, I cannot help but lament at the desolation required to have that amount of free time to oneself. But I’m alive right now so obviously I don’t want to die. I normally eat twice a day, but sometimes I don’t eat at all. There are times where I wash my face, times where I don’t wash my face, times where I make my bed and times where I don’t make my bed. There are times where I read the newspaper and times where I don’t read it. There are times where people think that I’m drunk every morning. There are times where I actually am drunk in the morning. If there are times where I drink for three days straight, there are times where it is as if I don’t drink at all. Writing letters, going to the bathroom, talking to guests, sometimes thinking about how good it would feel to have thousands of a currency called “pounds” deposited into the British bank. Because at the end of the day, one has to find a way to somehow obtain money, so the fact that writing a manuscript won’t necessarily bring me money is extremely troubling. But I have no other abilities besides writing so I don’t really have a choice.

In any case, the fact that people have trouble feeding themselves is both comical and extremely disconcerting. If you realize the fact that people are already working this hard just to be able to live, you truly feel how pathetic this whole thing is. I can’t know how many tens of thousands of years you’ve lived, but I can’t help but think that the terrible state that people live in right now wouldn’t even suit a monkey. No matter how you think about it, human beings are worthy of contempt. Yet there are people out there who are babbling about how this is apex of all creation. If this is the apex, then I would certainly like for it to act that way. I decided to make this “Chamereon” thing on a whim even though it might be canceled after its first edition. Anyway, I’ve decided to make it.

I think I’m a very normal and commonplace kind of person, but the “Tsuji Jun” that’s reflected through the lenses of socially tinted glasses appears bizarre. That probably comes from my inclination towards drinking. Everyone, when drunk, becomes thoughtless and crazy. It isn’t at all something that’s exclusive to me. Neither do I think that I particularly surpass being ordinary. If it was all about blindly following the words of philistines like society, bank workers, city councilors and the like, then I would have long become a water sprinkling husband or a mailman or something.

Why am I not an anarchist or a Marxist? Because unlike those people, I can’t have an excellent “ideal.” Or maybe it’s not that I can’t have an ideal, but that I can’t obtain one. Even I in the past have dreamed of a “utopia”, but that has long since disappeared from my grasp. On the contrary, I even believe that the useless dreams that human beings have only brought forth more despair. If there is an “ideal” in me, it would be the “lack of ideals” a world in which people stop spouting sophism, gain the awareness that they are “animals” and be free to innocently hop around the world. Although whether such a thing is possible is something that I don’t know.

I’m an outdated individualist. But I don’t think it’s necessary for me to express it with something formal like an “ist.”All I have to say is that “I am not you.”

It doesn’t mean anything other than “My face and your face may look similar, but we are not identical.” The existence that I call “myself” isn’t simply an “individual” but rather a more complicated “affair.” There’s no telling what will come out if you take me and shake me around. Even among “Japanese people” there are quite a wide variety of people who can be included in that term. It’s similar to how if you traced everyone’s bloodlines back and then individually looked through them to see what you would find. So even within something like “ethnic characteristics”, you can’t grasp anything significant. I think about this every time I take a trip to Kansai, and no matter what I can’t think of myself as being the same kind of person as them. (Of course, I’m speaking generally here) I think that even the feeling you get from the accent of the first words a person speaks to you can differ quite a bit. Sometimes I wonder if a race of Phoenician traders migrated over there in the distant past.

Thinking from recent social trends, I may be thought of as an intelligentsia tramp. I don’t care either way. Maybe there are some good things about being an intelligentsia tramp, and class consciousness? There’s that too. As a whole, I think things like sociology and economics are useless sciences. That may sound a bit harsh, but there was a time where people were able to live excellent lives without studying any of that. Although these were sciences that were created as a reaction to the demands of the times.

It’s not like I hold famous worldly things that most people wish for like money or women to be contemptible, nor does it follow that I have to hate them. It’s just that I scorn the kind of person who thinks about nothing except those things and sees them as the highest standard of what is valuable in this world. As a result, not only do I not look towards the bourgeoisie life, I think that if their existence inconveniences a large number of people, it would be better if they were gone. But unlike the communists, I don’t agree with using violence to threaten their existence. Under any circumstance, the use of violence can only bring forth misfortune among the people that use it. There is nothing that I hate more in this world than people who use violence under the pretense of justice.

In the beginning of Floyd Dell’s “Intellectual Bleaching” there is a part that says “Literature is, in a certain meaning, one form of an argument on life.” I certainly agree with this. For a while, I’ve been arguing from the standpoint of nihilism. In fact I’m still doing that now. But it’s not as if there is a special form of nihilism nor is there an unchanging ideology associated with it. It’s just that since a while ago, a variety of different people stood at the same place and expressed their own ideal. Time, nations and individuals each have their own form of it and have been expressing it in that form. Even within the same form of nihilism, there exists a variety of differences. I think that all people are nihilists from the start. It’s just that they have no awareness of it, or that they understand it too well and just don’t talk about it at that point. If there are people who aren’t like either of those, then they are either stupid or are liars.

I’ve been advocating for nihilism for quite a while now, but recently I’ve become sick of it. Because of that I’ve been thinking about changing “nihil” to “Chamereon” instead, but the word “nihil” is more well known, will get more readers and is rather convenient, so I’m just going to go with that. Human beings are creatures that get tired of things, so it’s not strange that I would also get tired of something.

I’m not particularly grateful that I was born into this world, but I find solace in the fact that I was able to learn about the teachings of great people like the Buddha, Laozi, Zhuangzi and Schopenhauer. All I’ve been doing until now is taking their teachings and expressing them in my own way. Unsatisfactory people should just run around underneath them. In fact, I’m imploring them to do so.

The reason why I first fell in love with literature is because I wanted to more deeply appreciate life. Of course, I didn’t balance that with the need for food, clothing or fame. So the fact that even now I can’t live off of literature is very strange. It’s also way too late in my life to be looking for a profession, and I can’t even find such a job. Maybe there really is no other way to live aside from writing. But I don’t want to change the way I think or feel to match with the currents of the times.

The other day I read Andre Gide’s “On Montaigne” translated by Kazuo Watanabe in the May edition of Saneatsu Mushanokouji’s “Nebula. ”Here are my thoughts on it. Montaigne was criticized about the fact that he took too much of an interest in himself, and in this book the author is trying to make clear the fact that the refutation of this criticism using Socrates’s idea of “knowing yourself!” is connected to learning how to bring the self to light. He quotes “Out of all the ancient thought related to human beings, the ones that I have selected and feel the most love for are the ones that most disdain, demean and ignore human beings; that is what I generally feel.” and then adds that Gide unknowingly speaks in favor of Pascal.

There’s no such thing as a fair and unprejudiced opinion. Even I constantly hold my own kinds of prejudice. What is most prejudiced is Marxist thought.