Skilled at Drawing on What Is Available — Xunzi, “Encouraging Learning”#

Before confessing to Michiyo, Daisuke encounters a difficulty in helping someone. A friend needs money; wanting to assist, he approaches his sister-in-law Umeko. She first asks when he will repay it. He had not expected her to take “borrow” literally.

Umeko knows he often looks down on his family and does not hurry to compete intellectually. She simply asks why someone so remarkable needs to borrow from someone like her. If nobody lends, how can his friend be saved? Supported monthly by his father and brother, Daisuke now takes another person’s need onto his account and asks the family for money. The goodwill originates with him; its means of realization must come from people he disdains.³

Her questions expose a relationship he continually uses without seriously acknowledging. He can criticize his family’s understanding and must still see how he lives through them. Otherwise, “I will save him” appropriates what others supply as his own ability.

Haruki goes further in action. In Kazusa True he actually resigns, finishes proofreading a special issue and prepares to hand work to Matsuoka. Matsuoka says the trouble begins afterward: his workload will double, and the editorial office had planned no new hiring. Hamada is negotiating with personnel; part-time staffing must temporarily increase. As Haruki ends a job, others’ jobs begin to change.⁴

Those changes also help make departure possible. Someone who “abandons everything” has not entered a place beyond social need. He requires continuity at his former workplace, new employment relations that can accommodate him, and his companion’s work and arrangements. In the after-story, he negotiates with Kudō at the Japanese branch and performs a manager’s duties within Kazusa’s schedule. Love and livelihood connect through particular people and organizations.⁵

Willingness, action and capacity can now be distinguished. Willingness acknowledges something as worth doing and accepts personal involvement. Action means actually resigning, handing over and making contact. Capacity concerns the skills and available conditions that the people involved can draw on to continue. A passionate declaration cannot replace an act; one successful act cannot guarantee unchanged conditions forever. Matsuoka’s agreement does not cancel added work. Haruki’s new job does not solve every future conflict by the same means.

An ideal need not be furthest from reality when it becomes most distorted. Sometimes it has traveled far on reality’s strength and refuses to recognize where that strength came from. Naming support, employment, divided labor and care does not debase love. It makes “I am willing” capable of joining “We can.”

Where One Lives Shapes Bearing; Nurture Shapes the Body — Mencius, “Exhausting the Heart,” I#

Juansheng in “Regret for the Past” once cooked with Zijun too.

That small fact cannot be omitted. Reading backward from the ending readily assigns them fixed identities from the start: a man who talks ideals, a woman who minds the stove. After moving to Jizhao Lane, however, Juansheng comes home from work and helps light the stove, cook rice and steam buns. It is then that he learns to cook. Zijun is not merely installed in the home: she breaks with her family, insists on selling her ring and earrings, and helps establish the household. They really make a modest home.⁶

Its early peace is real too. They can talk or be silent together. Zijun becomes lively and rosy. Juansheng says love must continually renew itself, grow and create; she nods in understanding. The work sustaining that peace gradually increases. Zijun has no time to talk, still less to read or walk. She devotes herself to cooking, keeping chickens and caring for their dog, Ah Sui. Her hands roughen and sweat plasters her short hair to her forehead. Juansheng sees the labor and feels uneasy.⁷

The question is how that uneasiness later changes direction.

When Juansheng loses his job, Zijun first says they must do something new. They discuss saving money, advertising for copying and tutoring work, writing to an editor and sending translations. He turns to the desk, moves the sesame-oil bottle and vinegar dish aside, and she brings over the lamp. It illuminates a plan really begun. Translation proves full of difficulties; the dictionary’s edges turn black. He is genuinely working and encountering genuine difficulties in the work.⁸

But the same room must now be kitchen, study and living space. Meals must be cooked on time; writing need not stop on time. He increasingly feels that Zijun’s sole accomplishment is eating, which interrupts his thinking. After several weeks they remove the constraint of fixed mealtimes on him. His work moves faster; her tasks remain. This speed is an actual advance and reveals whose time has gained greater command.

His urgency to find a way out is understandable. Since his work concerns both, another question follows: when one kind of work is protected, is the work sustaining daily life provided for too? Or must it still be done, only without speaking or interrupting the higher undertaking?

He sees Zijun as less brave than before and increasingly explains her through that loss of courage. The days that left her no time to read or walk retreat outside the explanation. Shared life requires labor; its distribution changes what she can do; he then uses the changed woman to prove his need to leave alone. Connected in this order, a jointly formed situation becomes one person’s character defect.

Yet the Juansheng who claims life alone will be easier still does not know how to take its first step. Of his submissions, a short essay is published. Repeated requests bring only two book coupons worth five jiao altogether, which do not resolve hunger. The many roads supposedly outside have not become a road already traveled successfully.⁹

Conditions of life therefore mean more than sufficient money. They include time to learn, somewhere to work, energy to hear someone else and the ability to rejoin valued activities after fatigue. Such capacities develop and can be depleted. If the arrangements sustaining love continually restore one person’s power to choose while eroding the other’s, the original declaration of freedom changes character in its realization.

Why Not Each Speak of Your Own Wishes? — Analects, “Gongye Chang”#

Michiyo does not merely assent when Daisuke confesses.

Why did he abandon her then? He admits cruelty and says he has already been punished: throughout her three years and more of marriage, he remained single. Wasn’t that his own choice, she asks? He then describes himself as undergoing her revenge. She explains that since marrying, she has wished he would marry soon. He does not take this in, continuing along his account of revenge, nature and repentance.¹⁰

She does not want him silent either. Had he never spoken, she says, she might not have survived. Gratitude for the late confession can coexist with questioning its lateness. Willingness to change their relationship does not endorse his full explanation of the preceding years. These simultaneous answers make it a conversation. Extract only the final decision, and the embarrassing statements before it become disposable obstacles again.

Later, when he explains his father’s withdrawal of support and fears failing in responsibility, Michiyo asks him to specify: what responsibility? Material responsibility, he says. She does not want that, she answers. He still treats poverty as the cause of her future discontent, which he must identify for her beforehand. Was this consequence not foreseeable all along, she asks?¹¹

Her reply does not remove money from life. She refuses to let “I cannot support you” decide how far her feelings may go. Later, however, she says that wandering would be acceptable, that she will do as he says, and even includes death within her resolve. She has won a voice within his monologue, and that voice may still surrender itself to his arrangements. Expressing a wish is an important capacity. It cannot alone obtain shelter, livelihood and bodily security.

This makes And Then more difficult than a brave confession. It allows answers and lets them expose unresolved matters. After Michiyo falls ill, Hiraoka calls a doctor and takes leave to nurse her. On the second evening of his care, she asks him to hear Daisuke’s explanation and repeats the request on the third day. He initially treats it as illness speaking, then takes it seriously. The meeting between men is not initiated solely by Daisuke’s courage. The ill Michiyo helps make it happen.¹²

At the meeting, Daisuke asks Hiraoka for Michiyo. He agrees to give her, after she recovers. Both use the language of giving and receiving; Hiraoka also invokes care to retain temporary authority over the transfer. Care, betrayal suffered and power over another need not belong to three different people. Precisely because they intertwine, willingness to take responsibility cannot confer every decision on the most responsible-looking person.

Kazusa True presses this question against Haruki’s explanation too. Setsuna asks whether the three could stay together. He thinks that revealing Youko’s illness might let them share the burden, then continues withholding it on the grounds that he cannot burden Setsuna. She does not know what he has ruled out for her. Later, knowing the situation, Takeya asks whether everyone contributing a little might produce a better answer. Haruki finally says that bearing it as three would prevent him from choosing Kazusa. He wants to live with her and have her for himself.¹³

This admission matters. He acknowledges a desire hidden beneath protection and rescue. Others can consequently no longer explain his departure as the only reasonable treatment plan. He rejects a possibility not because it could offer no help, but because it may not lead to the love he wants.

Acknowledging desire clarifies an action’s reasons without guaranteeing its justification and feasibility together. Setsuna will still be hurt; Haruki must still address the engagement and his work. A changed relation to one’s desire and an achievable new life are questions requiring separate evidence.

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

Sensei in Kokoro leaves the young man an exceptionally long letter. He says much about his past and strictly limits who may know.

When they are young, K confides his feelings for the daughter of their landlady. Sensei first feels preempted. Later, while both K and the daughter are absent, he asks the mother for her daughter’s hand. She readily agrees and sees no need to ask the daughter. Sensei initially mentions obtaining her consent, then accepts the mother’s assurance: how could she agree if her daughter would not? Meeting him on her way home, the young woman merely asks whether he has recovered from illness. She does not yet know what others have just accomplished concerning her.¹⁴

Years later, the marriage has really endured. Yet his wife frequently reminds Sensei of K, and she feels his distance. Does he dislike her? Is he hiding something? He repeatedly considers explaining and does not. Writing to the young man, he says he cannot bear to drop ink into her pure-white memory. He has even imagined her tearful forgiveness if he confesses.¹⁵

Protection and answering on another’s behalf meet here. His actual wife is already troubled, while purity remains the condition he prescribes for preservation. He holds the secret and interprets what should make her happy and how she would forgive. An imagined wife understands him; the questioning wife before him receives no answer.

The letter closes by calling her security in food, clothing and shelter fortunate. His past may serve others, but she is the exception. While she lives, the young man must keep it secret. The letter transmits knowledge and recruits its new recipient into secrecy. Sensei intends his arrangement for his wife to remain effective beyond his death.¹⁶

In Seminar XVII, Lacan treats discourse as a structure of relations beyond individual utterances: who demands from what position, who must answer with knowledge, and who is thereby represented. Following this approach, Sensei’s letter cannot be measured only by its quantity of truth. Knowledge reaches the young man together with a command. The wife is designated someone to protect and consequently excluded from her own marital history.¹⁷

Carefully attending to feedback may amount to checking whether someone understood, can act accordingly and pass the message on. Such conversation can be detailed and useful while retaining a fixed direction: the listener must get the speaker’s meaning right. Shared life sometimes needs accurate transmission. Sometimes it needs the other to say, “The good you seek is not what I want.”

These forms of feedback cannot be conflated. Finally understanding and executing more competently does not mean participating in the decision about the purpose. Sensei and his wife have assets that spare them immediate struggle for subsistence; he also arranges how the secret will pass on. Her answer to this happiness alone remains outside the arrangement. Stability can make that absence harder to notice.

Beyond Winding Hills and Streams, Another Village Appears — Lu You, “Visiting a Mountain Village”#

Sōsuke and Oyone in The Gate have lived intimately for six years. Social exclusion narrows the breadth of their lives while intimacy deepens. They warm themselves through each other; that warmth is not false. They buy cloth for clothes and rice from a shop, and need contact with surrounding people to maintain a home that seems to require only two.¹⁸

In difficulty, Oyone says there is nothing to be done; Sōsuke says they must endure. Such words keep poverty from turning wholly into mutual reproach. Yet when she occasionally hopes something good will happen, he replies that they are not entitled to expect good things. She falls silent. A tone that has helped sustain shared life can also leave new wishes nowhere to continue.¹⁹

When Koroku asks how to continue his education, Sōsuke answers with the same helplessness and admits all his failures, past and present. A brother’s acknowledgment of fault does not settle tuition or prospects. Koroku persists. Sōsuke tells him to think it over, then says that someone capable of so much complaining will do fine anywhere. The conversation stops there.²⁰

But The Gate does not leave Koroku there forever. By the ending he lives as a student lodger with the Sakais. Sōsuke proposes sharing the remaining costs with Yasunosuke. Koroku has not simply waited for his brother’s efforts: he negotiates with Yasunosuke himself, reaching the point where a formal request from Sōsuke should secure agreement. Oyone urges her husband to settle it.²¹

The new means arise from more than a stronger resolve in Sōsuke. The recipient acts, the wife prompts her husband, the Sakai household supplies lodging and another relative’s contribution approaches agreement. The older brother need not become omnipotent alone; the younger need not merely prove deservingness. More participants move matters beyond “nothing can be done.”

Accomplishing something within shared life can also change who participates and what means each possesses. Seeking Koroku’s education funds alters his dealings with brother, relatives and landlord. Money remains to be finalized; new negotiations have already occurred. They have means previously unavailable. Whether the family’s worldview has changed is another question.

Participating in his brother’s future does not mean Sōsuke can face all the past with his wife. After hearing that Yasui will visit, he considers telling Oyone at home. He calls her to his bedside, then asks for hot water instead. She can care for an unwell husband without being able to discuss what is making him unwell.²²

Relational capacities do not advance along one line. A household can improve at arranging tuition and receiving friends while maintaining the same silence on a particular subject. Judge change where it occurs. Life continuing is one fact; what can consequently be discussed anew is another.

Teaching and Learning Help Each Other Grow — Book of Rites, “On Learning”#

Setsuna True offers a more hopeful, less straightforward response to this gap.

Haruki asks Setsuna to help Kazusa. She hears “Save Kazusa,” not “Save me.” She agrees Kazusa takes priority and still admits resentment at hearing this correct answer. Willingness to participate does not turn her into a resource for rescue without feelings.²³

To sustain their meetings, Haruki and Setsuna prepare a proposal and use Youko’s connections to advance a recording project. Youko is a mother and must also see it from the agency’s position. Could a magazine’s bonus CD reduce the value of Kazusa’s first Japanese CD release? How many new listeners could it reach? Who can authorize its circulation? Negotiation is needed. Haruki knows why an earlier similar proposal failed and where the record company must be brought in. His and Setsuna’s professional experience becomes a condition for friendship to act.²⁴

These arrangements merit attention. They make meetings depend on more than one impassioned appeal and give three musical abilities a chance to work together. Yet when Haruki speaks of creating a situation where Kazusa and Setsuna must meet daily, he and Setsuna still set the purpose first. Thoughtful arrangements cannot, by thoughtfulness alone, be called happiness jointly decided by three.

Kazusa initially refuses simple acceptance. Setsuna uses her own family to imagine how one might deal with people and gradually resume life after a mother’s serious illness and death. Kazusa says that is Setsuna’s situation; she has no such people. This objection strikes the analogy’s limit. Support familiar to someone with many relatives does not become another person’s conditions merely through moving description.²⁵

To give “I am here” substance, Setsuna must keep visiting, arguing and finding things to do. When Kazusa asks her to sing, asks to hear Haruki’s words on her own music through Setsuna’s voice, another fact enters: the person helped proposes something she wants. It is still the old song. She has moved from refusing connection to asking to hear it.²⁶

The plan already exists and the song was written long ago. What changes is Kazusa’s relation to the undertaking. She can make demands as composer, listener and prospective performer. During the later recording, she reminds them of the time left, tells them to prepare and jokes with them. Each has a part to do. Kazusa no longer appears only as someone awaiting rescue.²⁷

Cooperation matters here beyond efficiency. It offers someone a place within a common activity and standards of her own to propose. A plan may originate in rescue and, once underway, contain musical quality, dependable companions and the pleasure of making music again. These contents give the cared-for person’s life uses beyond proving that rescue succeeded.

Joint discussion does not require everyone to decide everything with identical weight. Kazusa’s ensemble direction rests on skill; circulation must be handled by those authorized. The question is whether authority over its proper business exceeds that business, converting “I know more about this” into “I should arrange your whole life.”

Being able to direct a recording does not confer equal room in romance. Completing one collaboration does not mean every subsequent disagreement can change the arrangements. Music supplies a particular advance, not a guarantee covering engagements, families and every future day.

So Long as My Wish Is Not Betrayed — Tao Yuanming, “Returning to Farm and Garden,” III#

Willingness and ability change each other throughout these stories.

Initial willingness gives a person reason to commit and learn unfamiliar things. As life unfolds, one may discover that something formerly thought necessary is not needed, or encounter a previously unknown wish. The capacity for shared life includes accomplishing plans, hearing these changes and asking again what the plan is meant to accomplish.

The Kazusa True after-story leaves this question at dinner with Youko after returning to Japan. Kazusa uses communication devices more competently and speaks at length with her distant mother. Haruki handles managerial work and follows Youko’s illness closely. Separation and illness have been followed by new ways of sustaining life.²⁸

Children reveal differences among the three. Youko wants grandchildren soon. Kazusa explicitly says she is not opposed; Haruki is the obstacle. He internally explains one reason for postponement: childbirth might coincide with Youko’s death, burdening Kazusa with two changes. He and Youko have already discussed future care. Kazusa still grows silent when her mother’s condition comes up.²⁹

His concern has real weight and cannot be canceled by a single expression of willingness from Kazusa. Having children involves both people’s wishes; Haruki too must decide. Yet an arrangement aimed at protecting her must seriously hear her different answer about parenthood. If discussion always ends at “I know better what you can bear,” greater caregiving skill makes it harder for the recipient to help decide which life is being cared for.

In “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?”, Lu Xun stresses economic rights and asks whether economic freedom ends puppetry. The answer remains pessimistic: less chance of being pulled can mean more chance of pulling others. Those once resisting parents may later oppress children. He recommends recording youthful thoughts and rereading them after age and standing change. Old notes can let those who acquire power hear that they too once demanded not to be arranged by others.³⁰

Increased capacity and changed relations cannot stand as evidence for each other. Money, knowledge and practical competence are valuable powers. They may expand others’ activity or make existing arrangements harder to interrupt. Their direction must be judged by what another person’s different answer can actually change.

This does not require renegotiating continuation at every moment. An undertaking requires commitment and persistence. One cannot retreat to spectatorship at every step and decline action because one might be mistaken. Shared life especially requires distinguishing what is to persist: doing promised work well differs from requiring another person to maintain the same wish forever.

Joint work often needs reasonably stable arrangements so others can carry it forward. It also needs participants who can identify problems in those arrangements. Prior investment creates responsibility to reorganize, not a monopoly over reorganization. Harm already occurring cannot be allowed speech only after the supposedly complete undertaking ends.

Žižek’s criticism of the “beautiful soul” concerns more than passive inaction. The subject arranges the world beforehand to preserve a position as innocent sufferer. In intimacy we can ask more plainly: do we want something accomplished because it gives shared life substance, or because it finally proves “I am the one who sacrifices,” “I am the one who saves her”?³¹

The answer lies in events. Juansheng really makes efforts, and Zijun really helps establish the home. Acknowledging this lets us see how a shared way forward is later lost. Haruki really works for Kazusa, and Setsuna really advances the recording. Acknowledging this lets us ask how the women’s demands change the work’s meaning. Judging a lifetime by a single posture—brave or selfish—still stands outside life’s door.

“My clothes getting wet is no cause for regret, so long as my wish is not betrayed.” Tao Yuanming’s poem first gives us plentiful weeds and sparse beans, early weeding and a hoe carried home beneath the moon. Dew wets his clothes along the path. The wish has work to do and outcomes that may disappoint. The clothes are his; he can declare them no cause for regret. In shared life, one must also hear one’s companion. Her wet clothes cannot be dismissed on her behalf.³²

After love begins, wishes can grow into skills, and skills can take people somewhere they had not imagined. Wanting to continue means more than fidelity to the initial self. It means speaking to the person sharing life now and hearing what she wants today. Tomorrow can then remain a day both may participate in.

The next essay, “Where This Heart Finds Peace Is Home,” asks about another attraction: while shared life remains difficult, why does someone call a distant place or a particular room the only real world?