Long Down Escalator and a Philosophical Gorilla

1

I think I was at an important turning point in my life at that time. Of course, I didn't realize it at the time. All I could do was manage to get through one day after another that came and went without my asking. Those days were like running backwards on a long down escalator, and just keep going up and up and up. I was not allowed to stop. At the bottom, the darkness was wide open, waiting for me to fall. Sometimes a chilling wind would blow up from there. The icy cold air stuck to my back, and no matter how much time passed (no matter how much I moved), it wouldn't go away.

At that time, I was 20 years old and a sophomore in university. I moved to Tokyo from the Tohoku region and lived alone in a small apartment. At university, I majored in law. But I wasn't particularly interested in law. I chose law school because I thought I would become a civil servant someday. Of course, I wish I had been more enthusiastic about my studies. But unfortunately, I couldn't find anything within the university system that I felt passionate about. But anyway, it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference if I had chosen another faculty.

When I came to Tokyo, I tried not to have undue expectations of the outside world. Overly inflated hopes can lead to greatly inflated disappointments. If possible, I wanted to avoid such barren mental exhaustion. Instead of looking at what is not, we must look at what is. I must look to myself, not to others. That is what I told myself.

For the first year, this policy generally worked well. Of course, there were ups and downs, and I made some trivial mistakes. I was even fed up with my own immaturity. But even in such a situation, I tried not to speak ill of others. That would only make me feel worse.

However, I could not make friends for a long time. This is partly because I am not a very talkative person by nature. But when I looked at the people around me, I often felt as if I were a foreigner. They were playing their own game, under their own rules, using their own language. It was a strangely complete world. To the insider, everything was self-evident, but to the outsider, everything there was twisted into strange angles. I had no interest in their world or the game they were playing. In the end, they continued to live their lives and I continued to live mine.

And so the first year passed, and I maintained my original attitude; not expecting too much from the outside world.

Of course, that in itself is not wrong. If I had to live those days all over again, I would have approached life with the same attitude. But perhaps somewhere along the line, the balance was off. Maybe the needle was touching one side too much. By the time I realized it, I had lost hope not only in others but also in myself.

I wondered how things had turned out this way. I used to have enthusiasm. I used to have hope. Where on earth had it disappeared to? I looked inside myself again, searching for the enthusiasm and hope that should have once been there. What I found, however, was nothing more than an empty and dreary void, like the waiting room of an empty train station.

It was around this time that life began to seem like a long down escalator. I found myself being carried down the escalator, and I was climbing the stairs desperately trying to keep up with the speed at which it was going down. At the bottom, darkness gaped open. The escalator was sometimes maliciously (or so I thought) filled with cardboard boxes and other useless junk. I managed to avoid them as I climbed up. Sometimes I lost my balance and almost fell, but each time I managed to hold my ground. When I had a few moments to spare, I turned around and realized that the cardboard boxes and junk were part of my memories that I had once carefully stored. Those things disappeared with a hissing sound into the depths of darkness. Sometimes trash would fall from overhead. Looking back on it now, I suppose it was part of my memory of the past, but all I could think about at the time was how to survive the situation. So I stepped on the falling trash and junk and desperately continued to climb the moving stairs. The memories of the past were simply swallowed up by the deep darkness, without anyone paying attention to them.

I think it was May of my sophomore year of university. I met this man while I was eating lunch at the cafeteria. He asked me if he could sit across from me. I replied that I didn't care.

He said he was a sophomore in the Faculty of Literature. I didn't recognize his face. I wondered why this man suddenly came to sit across from me. Why did it have to be this particular seat? To tell the truth, I was feeling a little annoyed at the time. If possible, I wanted to eat lunch quietly by myself. But he didn't notice my feelings at all and just sat down in the seat across from me. On his tray was a large plate of chicken curry and three plastic cups of water. He sat down and first drank down two glasses of water with relish. Then, holding a spoon, he looked at the curry on the plate with the eyes of a predator stalking its prey. His eyes were now emitting a strange glint. "Who the hell is this guy?" I thought when I saw it. He was clearly the only one who stood out in the crowded cafeteria. The people around him were all glancing at him sideways. By the way, his head was a perfectly shaved, smooth skinhead.

"Why did you shave your head?" I asked, unable to resist.

"I was looking in the mirror the other day and thinking," he said. "I thought hair was just a nuisance. It's heavy, it's stuffy, and I have to go to the barber every time it grows. So I thought I'd just shave it all off. So I shaved it right then and there." As he said this, he looked at me with a strange look on his face as I repeatedly chewed each bite. "Why are you chewing so hard?"

"I try to chew each bite thirty times," I said. "This will stimulate my satiety center, so I don't have to overeat."

"I only chew about three times per bite," he said. And with great speed, he ate up the large plate of chicken curry. "I bet you go to bed early and get up early and brush your teeth properly every day."

"How do you know that?" I said.

"I can see it in your face."

"By the way, I take a shower and shampoo every morning," I said.

"I shampoo too," he said. "I even put on a conditioner."

"But you have no hair," I protested.

"That doesn't matter at all," he said. "I just like shampoo. And I like conditioner. I like it, so I can't help it. There's no reason for other people to criticize me." And he stroked his smooth head.

That's how we became friends.

He told me that although he belongs to the literature department, he rarely attends classes. "That's a waste of time," he said. "Life is short. You know, there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who waste time and those who don't. Which one do you want to be?"

"Well, I want to be a person who doesn't waste time," I said.

"The attitude is important," he said.

However, contrary to his words, it didn't seem to me that he was making effective use of his time. His behavior was always impulsive, restless, and inconsistent. At times he tried to paint abstract paintings, at other times he tried to be a contemporary musician, and at other times he tried to be an alchemist. He used to say, "I'm about to invent the Philosopher's Stone." But after long hours of trial and error, all he came up with was a chunky lump of sulfur that smelled like a boiled egg.

"I felt like taking a hot spring bath," I said, looking at it.

We maintained a relationship of being in and out of each other's lives. There were times when we would talk for hours straight, and other times we wouldn't see each other for weeks. Although our personalities were polar opposites, he and I somehow got along well. Even when we were talking nonsense, I often felt that we understood each other deeply from the small words we said.

When I met him in September of that year (though I had no idea how he had come to that decision), he had come to the conclusion that he should become a gorilla.

"I was observing them at the zoo again today," he said excitedly. "I can't tell you how calm they were. It's both majestic and beautiful. All human beings should be gorillas."

"You don't mean that they should have something like a gorilla in their hearts?" I asked.

He was truly gorilla-like indignant when he heard it. "Look, you don't understand anything," he said. "The gorilla thing is not in the mind. It's in your body." Then he growled in a low voice and drummed his chest with both hands, bobbing and bobbing.