Written on the first day—most of it was deleted, so this may feel a little strange.

This was the first Japanese light novel I properly moved on to. I found the resistance to reading much lower, and I could almost finish one in a single sitting. Yet language that flows so easily and asks for no thought often lacks a little depth and fullness.

Still, it gave me an opportunity for a change of mood. If I find myself in something similar again, I can read it again. In that respect, it is a masterpiece.

I would be willing to revise the book slightly: after the grim reaper sees them for the last time and says, “What am I going to do with you two?”, it would end. It would be nice for the story to stay fixed in a dream.

PS — continued on the second day. — “Died” at the end of winter break. 2024/2/20

I think the author put a great deal of work into whether people would regret giving up their lifespan. Just when both characters finally let go and feel no regret, he gives them a rattlesnake watch and turns back time.

The author says in the preface that it is like comforting words thought of only afterward. I understand that feeling. I often feel regret after I have already left, regret that I did not think things through. In this respect, the protagonists in Murakami’s writing and in The Great Gatsby have an advantage, because they are pure observers: calm, silent, not offering personal opinions to others, yet often able to say something unexpected at certain moments. Neither the author nor I can manage that, so the author wrote this novel and Murakami wrote On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.

The author seems to place great weight on “coming to terms with death.” For one moment, I too vaguely set myself the feeling that I would ascend on some day three years from then.

At bottom, what I want to think about more is idleness. I did not write about it yesterday because I was too exhausted and muddled.

My situation now is actually very similar to Aiba’s during his first few months. I can do everything I want (read novels, watch films and anime, play games; I can go out too, though I tend not to), and I am also pressed by a deadline. (Aiba knows that he will die on December 26 three years from then; I know that classes begin on February 26. Come to think of it, I have to return to school on the 25th. I had always thought it was the 26th; in the course of talking, another day has disappeared.) With that known outcome, the start of winter break and its later days brought changes in my mood similar to Aiba’s. Later on, I too gradually felt powerless and regretful. Although I kept a schedule similar to the one I had at the beginning, I did begin to doubt it and feel that it never changed. The joy novels initially gave me shifted a little later on.

Do people inevitably grow bored and regretful after living this way? The grim reaper says that most people begin seeking stimulation later on. A couple of days ago, I did open The Immortal Life, which I had thought I would never play again. I became absorbed in it for nearly twenty hours, trying to cover my unease with stimulation.

Aiba happened to choose a road different from other people’s, and Ichinose’s arrival also shifted his life from its ordinary course. Beautiful girls often have the power to change a person, so there is nothing wrong with saying that beautiful girls can save the world. But as I said after Boy’s Babylon, “There are too many good-looking people and too few interesting ones.” In reality, people as good-looking as Ichinose do exist, and even people as interesting as she is do exist, but the conditions for me to form a connection with one of them exist only in fantasy.

What should I do if no beautiful girl comes to save me at the end of winter break—go looking on my own? I do not think that is realistic. It would be easy to fall for an online-dating scam, because having worked with TTS, I know that it is now much, much easier for boys to pass as girls.

Put differently, I am anxious now because winter break is about to end. A few days from now, winter break will end, I will return to school, and I will adapt to life there again. The self who worried about winter break ending will have “died.” Perhaps I will again sink into boundless pleasure and grow anxious as graduation approaches, and then “die” again.

As a human being, as one of the ordinary people the grim reaper describes, without meeting a beautiful girl who saves me, I will always feel joy when a vacation begins, aimless in the early days, bored in the middle, and seek stimulation later on. Then, near the end, I will feel that I ought to make up everything I missed earlier and begin planning a schedule. So I will “die” again and again, until I finally die.

A fool always grows wise before dying.

This seems to come from one of Sugaru Miaki’s books. Perhaps it is Three Days of Happiness

: when Miyagi and he have only three days left, everything else seems to lose its color in their eyes. In an instant they seem to reach the state of sages, understanding that only the present and the other person matter, and that everything else does not. Later, after reading the manga adaptation, I wrote about it in After “A Year for Ten Thousand Yen”.

There is also the phrase “reborn into life.” Perhaps someone is gravely ill, told that they will not live more than three months, and then recovers after those three months. Such an experience makes them different. The question is whether the sage-time left by being “near death” can continue afterward. Or does that sage die as soon as the three-month deadline passes, while a new self begins new joy and aimlessness?

I have personally had a similar experience. Of course everyone has, though perhaps it did not feel as intense to them as it did to me. When the college entrance examination was a hundred days away, I naively wondered whether the days I lived—with only twenty hours of holiday and twenty-six hours of free time each week—would really end. The past was like an illusion, with only novels left as something real. The future was like a black hole, swallowing every possibility; I could not imagine it.

During the summer vacation, I did read novels and watch anime, almost everything I could. At university I lamented that time was hard won, and at first I took the initiative to study digital painting, modeling, game development, and neural networks. But as time went by, I found that I gradually valued time less. It was as if that period of strict preparation had merely extended the time of joy. And now I too am gradually sinking into aimlessness. The former sage died before I noticed. What I did afterward was more like the inertia he left behind: it pushed me along for a while, and now it is gone. Until I read this book yesterday, I vaguely began to recognize this—not that I had changed, but that that “I” had already died after the college entrance examination.

So the urgent thing is to leave “last words” for my winter-break self, though I am sure my future self will probably not reread them carefully.

I want to be saved by a beautiful girl too. Is that too flippant?