Outside the bus windows, fires burn on the sidewalk.
People press their hands to flames for comfort. Armed guards sit on lawn chairs outside of businesses shuttered for the night. Traffic diverts from a cordoned portion of the main road. You look at your watch and then down.
How does “emptying out your soul” matter? How could these writers, or any writer, pretend that their political situation had no bearing on their lives? If the Japanese autobiographical novel accounted for the individual, doesn’t that individual’s life function between all the other lives around it?
You feel your stomach grumble. You have no money for food on you. You have only old cereal at home. You shake your head. It wasn’t like this before. Children walk through the flickering streetlights. Before the anti-governmental forces took over the government, it wasn’t like this. But would they believe me?
Maybe, the individual who confesses and unburdens can face the world. But isn’t the process to get there still in the world? That process still requires people! You shake your head and wonder.
You were contacted that there may be a position available to be an expert on Japan. But studying that country directly would make you a clear target for the authorities. You use literature as a proxy. Pretend that you are a sentimental slacker with idle scholarly interests long abandoned by the educated let alone the general public. As your assigned job as a welder has been put on furlough because of a steel shortage, you have time, but no money. What would be threatening about lonely individuals recounting their lives?
You check your phone but have not received any new messages.
Your contacts are spread out in the region, but you have all learned to communicate in intricate, semi-private threads based on approved pop cultural references and personal history before the takeover. As you sit at your bedside and scroll through a thread, you think how much different is this from courtly messages in an old imperial court? If the authorities could tease out the content, they still couldn’t infer what we meant.
You get off the bus, and enter the complex. You ignore yelling across the hall and the pangs in your stomach and fall into the twin foam mat. Tomorrow you study Soseki and how Japan privileged the individual and their country to the exclusion of everyone else. And whether that makes sense.