Nourishing a Bird as One Would Nourish Oneself — Zhuangzi, “Perfect Joy”#

By the time Kazusa returns, Haruki has a job.

He puts a recorder on the table and asks his interview subject about competitions, plans and Japanese performances. Kazusa says she will not come to Japan; Youko smooths things over. When mother and daughter argue about competition results, he can still interject that neither is being very grown-up. Once familiar people have business cards, forms of address seem available for relearning: from “Touma” to “Miss Kazusa,” even old intimacy can accommodate a professional tone.⁴

Youko and Kazusa face their interviewer, Haruki. Once the recorder is on, an old acquaintance also becomes a working relationship. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

Work does not diminish the old attachment. It supplies concrete routes for it: a reason and a time for the next meeting, professional secrets that others find awkward to question. Haruki can take his work seriously and use that seriousness to approach someone he wants to see. The same person can be exceedingly earnest about both.

He tells Setsuna about meeting Kazusa in Europe, stops partway and decides he has said enough. Later, when the interview is published, Setsuna recognizes Strasbourg in a photograph. He had avoided the cathedral and recognizable landmarks and omitted the location from the article. He has still not escaped her recognition. Setsuna says she never forbade him to see Kazusa. She wanted to know before they met.⁵

“You must not see her” and “Tell me first” ask for very different lives. One removes Kazusa; the other gives Setsuna an opportunity to respond. Haruki evades the latter. He secures his meeting without giving her a chance to answer beforehand. Knowing would hurt her, so he lets her know a little less. Bearing the burden of concealment himself can even take on the air of consideration.

Such consideration is difficult to untangle because care really has occurred. Kazusa is injured in the snow; Haruki stays and keeps her warm. His actions are real. So is his awareness that their closeness exceeds ordinary friendship. Calling all the care false in order to expose the excuse would manufacture an easier person to explain: remove the mask, find the real face, and everything afterward already has its answer.⁶

A person who sincerely believes himself to be a certain kind of person may use that belief to evade the choices he is making. “I am responsible” should require him to clarify matters. With practice, it can instead certify that whatever he does must have responsible reasons. A name moves from an obligation still to be fulfilled to a document already signed.

Nor can all of Haruki’s reliability be returned to the category of disguise. His editors need him; colleagues really entrust him with work. Setsuna has trusted his care, and Kazusa has depended on it through difficult moments. An identity can conceal so much because it has a real history. Without any credit, why go to all this trouble?

The question is therefore not whether “reliable” is true enough. When Setsuna expresses a wish that does not fit his consideration, can this reliable man stop and listen again? Does responsibility mean settling your pain for you, or also hearing you say that I have handled it wrongly?

Holding Your Hand, Growing Old Together — Book of Songs, “Beating the Drum”#

Coda Normal moves forward a year.

Haruki is still busy at work, discussing schedules with Setsuna by telephone. They are engaged, planning a June wedding and talking about where they will live. The Ogiso family table gradually becomes his table too; her father invites him for drinks, and visits acquire a rhythm. This life contains chores and the pleasure of expecting each other. Setsuna says she wants to experience arguments and missed connections with him as well.⁷

Declaring all this a compromise because he did not choose Kazusa first erases the days Setsuna actually enjoys and cancels one of Haruki’s loves. An engagement is not automatically invalidated by the persistence of another attachment. Fidelity in shared life includes arranging time and keeping promises; an eternally untroubled inner life cannot be its only proof.

Haruki has obtained no such innocence himself. He loves Setsuna and knows his love for Kazusa has not disappeared. Perhaps it will remain in ten or twenty years, he thinks. At life’s end, he hopes to look only at Setsuna. This is a sentence extended toward the future. He has not yet lived those years.

Calling it deception is premature. Treating it as a lifetime guarantee already secured is equally premature. Its weight lies in the speaker’s need to keep living, gradually giving a still nonexistent future substance. Everyday meetings will not erase his other love, but they may make “I want to live with you” a fuller sentence than it was at first.

Two easily confused kinds of fidelity become distinguishable. One asks that my actions answer to the commitment I acknowledge. The other asks that my entire past and every stirring of feeling certify the present choice as the only possible one. The former allows people with contradictory hearts to stay together. The latter forces them to give false testimony about their history. In admitting that he still loves Kazusa, Haruki at least has not cleaned his heart into a show home.

What we hear, however, is chiefly his inner voice. The ending does not equally develop how Setsuna learns about and understands this lasting love. The happiness she expresses by telephone does not mean she has answered every unspoken sentence of the narration. An everyday life exists; an interpretation of it may not yet be shared.

This gap gives stability both substance and a question. Staying together can begin before complete understanding, but must then make room for changes in understanding. Otherwise, when she says something new ten years later, he can answer with their happiness ten years earlier: hadn’t she already agreed?

Moving with the Times — Book of Changes, “Decrease,” Commentary on the Decision#

The affair route encloses that winter tightly.

At first Kazusa says that real love belongs to Setsuna. She only wants the false kind, only the time before she leaves Japan. Calling it false seems to remove the need to claim the place of a real lover. Setting a limit seems to prevent anything within it from growing beyond that limit. Feelings are not particularly respectful of contractual convenience.⁸

At the inn, Haruki wants to keep traveling north, as far as possible. He thinks of the first train tomorrow, Sapporo or another remote hot spring. Kazusa trembles in his arms. Someday he will make her happy, he says. Not someday, she answers. Now. Just a little.

He proposes again. They exchange vows for sickness and health, poverty and wealth. She wants to become Kazusa Kitahara; he wants her to write that name in the inn register tomorrow. Her joy is real. Continuing to call this merely a physical relationship would repeat the convenient initial contract’s refusal to acknowledge what has since changed.⁹

Private vows at the inn. Kazusa asks for a little happiness now; Haruki promises a shared life afterward. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

A vow can borrow strength from the future. “I do” does not merely report a fact completed inside one’s heart; it asks another to help make something that did not previously exist. Its unfulfilled state is no reason to dismiss it. The danger lies there too: two people changed by this night may imagine that the night can henceforth speak for every morning.

On the third morning of the journey, Kazusa wants to end it.

She first says this was decided from the beginning. Haruki disbelieves her, asking when she decided and whether last night’s words, and those before they left, were all lies. She initially calls them lies together. Finally, she acknowledges that until last night she still wanted them to escape. The decision was made only just now, after repeated wavering, when she saw his smile.¹⁰

This reversal cannot be read merely as stubborn denial followed by an admission of true feeling. Her first falsehood makes a difficult new decision appear settled from the outset, to stop his questioning and help herself leave. She then admits love without retracting her decision to go. Yesterday she wanted to stay; today she still loves him; today she decides to leave. These statements are painful together, but do not cancel each other.

If Haruki asks only which statement is truest, he may seize upon love and invalidate the rest. He reasonably asks Kazusa not to present her unilateral words as their agreement. Yet agreement cannot become permission that a person must obtain before leaving. She cannot say on his behalf that he wants to separate; he cannot establish that she must stay by saying he does not.

Kazusa also wants to preserve a Haruki she recognizes. The Haruki she loves considers other people, she says. This man who only clings to her is damaging the person she loved. The judgment contains changes she has really seen and an image she cannot bear to lose: she wants all of him and loves his inability to care only for her. “The real Haruki” becomes a name contested by two wishes, not an essence hidden beyond contradiction, waiting to settle the case once found.¹¹

Their love is deep on this route precisely because each person’s wants reach incompatible parts of the other. Sincerity does not make desires mutually compatible. Acknowledging this keeps Kazusa’s departure from being reduced to cowardice and Haruki’s plea for her to stay from being reduced to wrongdoing.

The snow outside the train window has made Haruki think of Snow Country. He describes his daytime self as a performance of common sense and his nighttime self with Kazusa as the real one. The day does not stop at this naming. His editors handle unfinished work, his superior apologizes elsewhere, and they try to preserve a job he can return to. When the fugitive names one part of himself true, people left behind must keep working for the other part.¹²

These colleagues are not present simply to administer social punishment. They complain and protect him. If the world were nothing but constraint, the couple’s freedom would seem beyond question. The script retains kinds of goodwill that refuse this tidiness. They do not condemn love, but make “We have left everything behind” difficult to say cleanly.

I Speak Earnestly; You Listen with Disdain — Book of Songs, “Restraint”#

After the separation, Haruki confesses to Setsuna.

Did he think of her while he was with Kazusa, she asks? Inside, he knows he did, many times. Aloud, he says he never thought of her then. This lie does not lessen his guilt; it increases it. He wants no possibility of mitigation left. Setsuna must know that he is bad through and through.¹³

This is more painful than the usual account of lying. Checking a statement’s truth identifies the lie. Understanding why he chooses the worse version requires asking where he has placed Setsuna.

By confessing every offense and specifying what he no longer deserves, he also prescribes how she should understand the injury. If she still wants the contradictory history, still wants to know when he remembered her, he refuses to leave that complexity available. A bad man’s confession can demand that the injured person accept it entire. Confessing does not necessarily surrender the power to interpret others. Sometimes it merely dresses that power in black.

Žižek’s discussion of the “beautiful soul” asks how a person participates in arranging a situation so that he can always appear innocent, coerced or wholly self-sacrificing. The issue is neither whether he suffers nor whether he seems inactive. Apparent yielding can actively maintain the only positions others are allowed to occupy. Applied to Haruki, the question gains a further step: after proclaiming total guilt, has he really relinquished the arrangement of everyone else’s roles?¹⁴

Sensei’s testament in Sōseki’s Kokoro reveals a related, colder relationship. He writes his past to a young man, hoping confession will help others understand humanity. He even admits that more than half his motive for writing comes from an inner need. But he reserves one exception: his wife must not know. He wants her memory of her own past kept as unsullied as possible and asks the young man to preserve the secret while she lives.¹⁵

He has placed his life under his own judgment, yet still curates how much his wife should know of hers. Confession opens toward one person; protection shuts the door on another. Looking only at the thoroughness of confession misses that door. Calling it simply cruel misses how the desire to protect her helps close it.

“Regret for the Past” gives another “for your sake” more immediate weight. Juansheng tells Zijun he no longer loves her, adding that this is better for her: she can do things free of attachment. His confession has not resolved what life she will enter after love ends, or whether she can become free as his words suggest. Later he acknowledges that he lacked the courage to bear falsehood and shifted the burden of truth onto her instead.¹⁶

In his memoir, Zijun had left her family, built happy days with him and contributed money to establish their home. Juansheng had also learned to cook. Freedom’s beginning does not become false because of subsequent failure. The change occurs within their shared life: household labor increasingly consumes her time; unemployment makes his own prospects urgent. Finally, beginning from his release, he announces for her a freedom with nowhere yet to go.

These works meet at the relationship that remains after confession. Telling the truth can be necessary without single-handedly making another person’s subsequent life possible. Saying something worse can settle what follows still less.

Setsuna returns on the affair route. Still in her stage clothes, she catches up with Haruki after he leaves the performance early; people inside are waiting for her. He recalls that she returned to him a week after the injury a year earlier and has kept him company since. Her initiative cannot be erased from the relationship, any more than her pain can.¹⁷

Haruki thinks sentencing himself to the worst means assuming responsibility to the end. Setsuna still has to come to him, again and again. His guilt has not diminished. It reveals what naming guilt cannot do: feed a person, sustain work, make song audible again, or answer someone who continues to have a life of her own.

The Road Is Hard, with Many Forks — Li Bai, “The Hard Road,” I#

Haruki really acts in Kazusa True.

His editors can barely believe he is resigning. The man so devoted to rules, so tiresomely responsible, is leaving. He promises to finish the work in hand. Ten days later, the handover is underway. His colleague Matsuoka takes on his tasks and tells him directly how much more work that means.¹⁸

Resignation is not replaced by “I must be faithful to love.” Tasks land on someone else’s desk; those staying have reason to be unhappy. Matsuoka rebukes him for leaving work behind, but also for assuming nobody would want to attend his farewell party. Later, joking with colleagues at the gathering, Haruki feels warmth and recognizes memories of Japan he can take away intact. People he had assigned the role of estranged parties do not entirely follow his script.¹⁹

This gives the decision more weight. Departure must be spoken personally, work handed over, and others’ reproaches heard as more than a backdrop for one’s heroic sacrifice. Meanwhile, colleagues’ willingness to say goodbye does not remove their extra workload. Warmth is no certificate of exemption. These facts alongside each other are what an adult’s departure from a life looks like.

In love, Haruki cannot remain merely Kazusa’s rescuer either. She explicitly asks him to betray Setsuna and choose her. This demand cannot be eliminated by distributing things equally: she wants to live with this person, and that includes his no longer belonging to another in the old way.²⁰

When Takeya asks about facing matters together as three, Haruki acknowledges that doing so would prevent him from choosing Kazusa. He has not calculated the combined happiness of three people and discovered that this route maximizes it. He wants Kazusa; there is a private desire that cannot delegate its explanation to the common good. Here he finally signs the decision with his own wish instead of claiming everyone’s interests require it.²¹

In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan’s interrogation of service to the good also presses this question: whose good? Goodwill cannot guarantee that a person has incurred no debt toward desire, and established goods cannot accommodate every desire in advance. Yet there is no ready bridge from this to “Whatever I want most is permissible.” Desire prevents a person from speaking only through an account of interests. It does not speak every necessary word for him.²²

Haruki’s separation from Setsuna must accordingly be considered in two directions. He may end an engagement he cannot continue to honor without waiting for her to agree that it is best for her. He must also acknowledge that his decision hurts her and that she may reject his explanation. The right to leave and the right to prescribe how another accepts departure are not the same right.

Setsuna asks what is wrong with her and whether there is still time to change it. Nothing, he says. This answer preserves her freedom from responsibility for his choice and places her where there is nothing to work on: if nothing is wrong, why can she not stay? The offered forms of compensation exclude precisely what she wants.²³

No more skillful wording can remove this pain. Yet by then withholding Youko’s illness, Haruki continues filtering the facts Setsuna is allowed to bear. He also thinks that telling her could lead to the three caring for Youko together. Not adding to Setsuna’s burden is entangled with not letting that possibility unsettle his decision. Isolating the first reason and calling it tenderness would conceal half his choice.

Later, Setsuna cannot leave Japan with him. She speaks of family, friends and work, of being unable, after all, to stop being a daughter. She even interprets these ties as evidence that she does not love enough. We have no reason to accept that judgment and demote all her other relations to signs of insufficient love. A person with several loves she cannot sever does not therefore have less of a heart.²⁴

In “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?”, Lu Xun distinguishes the will to walk out from the means of living afterward, and refuses to prescribe the same sacrifice for everyone. Literature need not provide a universal social remedy. Readers should nevertheless see who supplies the fares, work and relationships required for an upright departure. Here, courage cannot be monopolized by those who leave, with everyone who stays dismissed as insufficiently resolute.²⁵

Kazusa True accomplishes a real departure. Two years later, in a room in Vienna, Haruki and Kazusa open a link Youko has sent and download the file together. Holding the old guitar, Setsuna tells the camera she is still singing.²⁶

A recording reaching Vienna two years later: Setsuna, the old guitar and “POWDER SNOW.” PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

This return is first a life someone else has already made. She can record a song, friends can be present, and the intervening time acquires content not narrated by Haruki. The image does not require the couple to move back to Japan or issue forgiveness for every injury. It confronts “I have left those people behind” with a new fact: those left behind also act, and can choose what to send here.

Love lets Haruki and Kazusa leave their former life. The hand opening the file must still learn to receive something it had not anticipated. The decision loses no force. It finally need not prove itself by imagining another world dead.

The Exemplary Person Finds Harmony without Sameness — Analects, “Zi Lu”#

Setsuna True begins with a request for help. Haruki asks Setsuna to save Kazusa: he can no longer do it. Setsuna agrees that Kazusa must come first for now. He wants to fall into her arms for consolation, yet asks her to save Kazusa first. She affirms that priority and admits her resentment: his doing the right thing hurts her too. Accepting the request has not made her free of jealousy.²⁷

What matters on this route is that she goes with her jealousy.

Speaking to Kazusa about her mother’s possible death, she begins by imagining her own mother’s death: there would be doctors and relatives to speak to, business to attend to, days to live through in grief. Kazusa says she does not have that many people. You have me, Setsuna says, and Haruki. The pain of losing a mother would still have to be faced. But in a future Kazusa imagines herself inhabiting alone, Setsuna names people who could do things with her.²⁸

Her mother’s death remains a feared possibility; the agency is already a place where arrangements must be negotiated. Haruki and Setsuna spend a day planning, then he seeks Youko’s approval for an arrangement allowing the two women to meet every day. Setsuna has no certainty, only a wish to try a few more times. Work again gives these wishes reasons to return. Kazusa need not like her, and “It’s for your sake” alone cannot entitle her to stand at the door forever.

Their meetings contain harsh words. The old departure, who obtained whom, who has the right to speak of love: each is brought back. They slap, apologize and quarrel again. When Kazusa calls herself bad, Setsuna does not let the name end the conversation. “Bad person” is another convenient door: if that is what I am, why do you keep coming? Setsuna keeps coming anyway.²⁹

A confrontation between Kazusa and Setsuna without Haruki present. Apology does not immediately end their disagreement; they begin arguing again. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

Violence has no natural magic of mutual understanding. What changes in this conflict is that each woman’s successive statements encounter someone who talks back. Neither can keep the other solely inside her past. The Setsuna Kazusa hates refuses to be satisfied with the winner’s place; the Kazusa Setsuna loves will not stop being jealous merely because kindness arrives. Each has to face a more troublesome, more particular person.

“For her sake” changes meaning too. When Haruki edits facts for Setsuna, he defines her good unilaterally. Setsuna still arrives with ideas of her own, but now has to bear Kazusa’s face-to-face refusals, sarcasm and questions. The ideas do not disappear. They enter a conversation that can be interrupted. The person helped is no longer confined to receiving a favor or refusing everything.

Later, Kazusa acknowledges that a world of three hurts her, that she still loves Haruki and will still be jealous. She also asks not to be excluded. Setsuna calls Haruki and asks him to get the guitar. Kazusa wants to hear again the music she composed, his lyrics and Setsuna’s voice. Setsuna sings; Haruki accompanies. There is no piano tonight. Setsuna arranges for it to join tomorrow.³⁰

In this call, Kazusa is no longer merely someone sent off by the couple’s song. She can name the song she wants and participate in arranging the next occasion. Setsuna too says not to erase her or leave her outside what concerns all three. Her wishes no longer appear only in the voice of someone facilitating others’ happiness.

Music thus matters beyond a return to high school. Back then, people with different wishes completed the same song together. Now they must acknowledge those differences and arrange fresh cooperation around them. Friend, lover and musical partner need not coincide completely. Musical partners can continue changing each other without equal places in marriage or romance.

Later, the three reach the recording studio. Setsuna has just been crying; Haruki asks whether she has cried enough, and she tests her voice. Studio time is limited. Kazusa brings up the old complaint that the lyrics arrived a day late. Before the take, Setsuna is fully confident; Haruki is only eighty percent sure. These small mismatches give the joint work the sound of work being done: someone must write, practice and wait, and someone must begin before certainty is complete.³¹

A recording session involving all three. The shared song depends on their separate preparations and cooperation. PS3 gameplay frame: ©2012 AQUAPLUS / via xueyinhualuo, Bilibili.

They do not first wash away jealousy to qualify for working together. Working together gives wishes beyond jealousy room to grow. A situation that once seemed to permit only possession or withdrawal now contains other actions.

Renew Yourself Today, Every Day, and Yet Again — Book of Rites, “Great Learning”#

The person most capable of keeping things going is also most readily asked to keep them going forever.

Return to the opening. Haruki asks forgiveness; Setsuna asks whether everything must be forgiven today and whether she must keep saving him afterward. Sending the unsent messages really interrupts the old arrangement. Words that had not arrived finally do. Haruki can no longer hear only that she understands.¹

In analyzing formal freedom, Žižek attends to an offer whose answer is prescribed in advance: you may choose, but we both know which option you should take. Actually accepting the opportunity meant to be politely refused makes the situation awkward. This distinction makes the five minutes more striking. Anger is permitted, but returning afterward is already written into the conditions of permission.³²

Yet this agreement is not a command issued by Haruki alone. Setsuna too wants to be his home. That wish has enabled her courage and is helping make the life she wants. Were we to decree that only refusing the proposal would count as freedom, we would substitute another obligation for the wish she has expressed.

The question is whether that wish can survive only through her never withdrawing and always understanding. Can she love them and one day lack the strength to mediate? Can she agree today and bring unresolved anger back tomorrow without being accused of ruining today’s happiness? A commitment certainly binds one’s future self. But if it requires the end of new feelings and judgments, it invites a living person in and asks her to live as an old portrait.

Haruki faces another difficulty. If he waits to decide until he no longer wavers, nobody will be hurt and every condition is ready, how much longer must others wait for his caution? Saying every choice needs revision can sound comprehensive while giving him another garment in which not to act.

A finite action nevertheless requires commitment without an overall guarantee, allowing a process really to unfold and then reflecting on what happened. Thought cannot stand outside action, ask action to take the risks and permanently reserve for itself the position of having been right afterward.

In these three lives, commitment means that Haruki must choose in his own voice and fulfill the choice himself. Merely expressing understanding cannot answer Kazusa’s and Setsuna’s demands. Someone will be disappointed; some paths will close; new understanding cannot retract an injury already done. This is the weight of a promise.

Committing to a relationship still differs from prescribing its participants’ only permissible voice. Making a song together requires practice and punctuality, not reconsideration whenever things get hard. Yet a partner’s complaint about cooperation is precisely the feedback needed to continue the work. Promises make certain choices less casual and give other demands grounds: because he promised a shared life, she can ask him to listen seriously; because they promised to come tomorrow, they must address what today’s conversation left unresolved.

The four endings cease to be four certificates of character. Normal lets shared days acquire substance while retaining inner thoughts the couple has not jointly spoken. The affair route gives sincere vows whose altered answers are nearly crushed by yesterday’s sincerity. Kazusa True accomplishes a break and encounters the return of people who have lived on after being left. Setsuna True sustains direct conversation and joint work, but still needs to leave the person best at understanding others time not to understand.

These differences cannot be assembled into a lossless fifth ending. They reveal that being true to oneself also entails gradually losing the sole right to explain everything. Earlier desires, present decisions and subsequent life do not naturally speak in one voice. People must answer for the changes between them if a momentary self is not to become everyone else’s lifelong judge.

“Looking back where the wind and rain passed”: first the passage, then the backward glance. In Su Shi’s lyric, the rain has passed; a little earlier, there was still a chill. “Neither wind and rain nor clearing skies” does not mean that the rain never fell. What changes in recollection is one’s relation to the weather.³³

Coda leaves such a possibility of looking back. People may enter a new life carrying a past not wholly resolved. The new life may give that past different weights. Those weights cannot forever be measured by the first person to speak.

The next essay enters everyday life after the endings. The decision has been spoken and years have passed: what makes staying together worth continuing?