The First Notebook
…Possibly, that’s not unique to anyone.
“Mine has been a life of much shame.”
My gaze happened to land on that line.
The end of the year was approaching, and the family was in the middle of a full house clean. As I was organizing my collection of books, my hand unconsciously reached out for a certain one.
I think I picked up this particular book, among the many I have, because I felt a strangely intense connection to the title itself, its four characters in Japanese.
No Longer Human.
I seemed to recall having read this book around the beginning of middle school.
But coming up to the middle of “The Second Notebook,” I’d slammed the book shut, and I hadn’t been able to read it since. It had been a difficult read for me at the time, and it was also a little boring for a middle school kid. There was plenty of other fun stuff out there, and I hadn’t been so starved for entertainment that I needed to bother trying to be all smart and read kind of a hard book.
That was why I’d closed this one.
Because I’d felt as if I—the person I really am, the person I’ve always kept secret and continued to hide—would be exposed. I had the feeling that even the reason I tried to read this particular book back in middle school was probably written in here.
But the reason I was reading it now was because I thought I’d gotten rid of it. I’d been so surprised, I just picked it up.
Thinking about it properly, though, there was no way I could get rid of this book.
They say that a bookshelf is an expression of its owner’s personality.
Then I’m sure this is who I really am. That’s why I could never let go of it, just keeping it closed up, pretending I didn’t see it. But despite that, I had picked it up one more time.
A sign or fate.
I’m not the type to believe in that stuff, but then being too eager to reject them feels like affirming them, so I don’t like that, either.
I wiped the built-up dust off the bookshelf, then went straight over to the sofa to sink down into it—the rest of the book. Going beyond what I hadn’t been able to keep reading back then.
I would have to look at it now.
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