Content area
Full Text
While teaching a winter semester in Berlin, I was often asked about Okinawa.
Apart from that, during my recent stay in Okinawa, my thoughts kept returning to a conversation I had with composer Takemitsu Toru (1930-1996), a friend I had admired since my youth, when I visited him in the hospital. As it turned out, he had been hospitalized for the last time.
Takemitsu told me that he had scaled back his work plans to fit the time he had left. "I have clear themes for writing a symphony, chamber music, guitar music and flute music, and I have decided on the styles to follow," he said. "All that's left is to finish the pieces and deliver them to the people whom I want to hear them.
"You should work this way when you reach my age," he told me. "It's painful, but you have a good time. How else can people in lines of work like ours operate in their final days?"
Having reached the deceased composer's age, I thought I should follow his advice. What I did first was to choose Okinawa as the theme of current affairs essays I was going to write. At the same time, I decided what style to follow for the essays.
I made my first visit to Okinawa when I was 30. Based on this trip, I wrote a book titled Okinawa Notes five years later. Driven by strong emotions-I was ethically battered by a sense of guilt as a novelist who had lived on the Japanese mainland-I did my best to write it, mobilizing all my potential as a writer for the job at hand. But in retrospect, having lived to more than twice the age I was then, I realize the book left much to be desired. I say this because I think an essay on current topics should pinpoint the problem at hand and suggest ways to resolve it.
Being a young writer, I approached the Okinawa issue with the attitude of trying to solve an unsolvable problem-pursuing it and in the end just lamenting over it. As a consequence, I left the Okinawa issue unresolved.
The Okinawa issue continues to confront Japanese in a fundamental way when we look back over the way...