May Nineteenth, Twenty xx
Dear Little Miss Elise,
Smoking is stupid, and nobody should do it. I utterly despise how it makes my fingers smell, but every morning, I still go out onto the tiny balcony in secret to enjoy myself for a little while. I’ll quit when I leave. I won’t have a reason to smoke once I leave. You shouldn’t smoke, Elise, even if he does. Don’t pick up his nasty habits. I’m not saying smoking is a nasty habit I picked up from him, though. Not every nasty part of me was inherited. Much of it was grown on my own, through my own tricky work and difficult, poor choices. I’m by no means the product of my environment. I’m not a product at all.
I am a product no more.
Ah, but we must remember my smoking. Here is my routine for when I smoke, which is often. It is written in an instructional way, but do not take it as instruction:
one. You must sneak out to the balcony late at night. It’s late May, so nights are pleasantly warm and bearably humid.
two. You will have a cigarette that you used to buy behind Fedya’s back, but now purchase in his face.
three. Watch every car. See the stubborn stars in the sky that can survive Yokohama’s light pollution.
four. Glow.
I have begun to glow every night. It is a painful process that strips me of all I am, a process second to probably heroin when it comes to immediate gratification. It doesn’t hurt like cutting yourself because it’s not meant to hurt you. It doesn’t hurt like a growing pain, even though you become new again, finally, when you glow. There is nothing to compare it to. Nothing is gained by a comparison for you to grasp it because it’s something only I need to understand. But I think it’s something that you, Elise, can do. I think you’re a product of men and women and boys and girls who can glow, who have glowed and glown their entire lives because they haven’t found much else better to do. I glow all the time. I glow alone. People used to try and grasp me, but they never succeeded. They wanted me because I could glow, because I was something beautiful and new and strange and different to them. I was a magical nymph that they couldn’t comprehend, and because they couldn’t comprehend me, they only wanted me more. Many of them were inside me, around me, pressed breast to chest, heart to heart. They thought glowing could be transmitted somehow; surely they did. I don’t think it’s fair to think of them all as completely evil for the ways they sought out what glows, not because it wasn’t wrong, but because everything they did before and after was so evil that to compare this search to those actions by calling it “evil” would be an insult. Mori knows all this just as well as you. You probably know it better than I. It has been quite a long journey to rediscover these things, this process of freedom. I still cannot guess myself how I managed to glow so bright at my worst, when I had nothing to feed the furnace, the flame, the lightning-bug. When I left everything behind, I couldn’t glow for some time. I thought I had somehow imagined it all. A fantastical process I had created to survive; I had to glow to live. It was only after being hit by that car–a car with you in it–that the familiar light returned to me. Since then, I have been free to glow on my balcony, unabated, cigarette in tow.
While smoking, while glowing, I thought of puppies, and I thought of you.
Elise, you are a German girl who is the product of a Japanese man’s memories of a different German girl, memories filtered through so many layers upon layers of rose-coloured glasses and irony that things are not just pink, but so, so blurry. This is to say that you are no more truly German than our German Shepherd, Billy Pilgrim, who was born in Japan, given a stupid English name, and is owned by a sad Japanese man too scared and guilty to visit any part of Germany that exists outside the recesses of his memory. Billy Pilgrim wears no lederhosen and eats no strudel. He is a dog. You are almost a girl, but you are not. You are something much worse; you are an idea. You are somehow simultaneously more German than a German Shepherd and not German at all, depending on who is asked. If you ask one very specific man, you are every single happy memory and experience Germany has to offer. If you ask anyone else, you are nothing, not even an idea, not a Platonic ideal, not hope, not love, not a dream—you are a delusion. This is why ideas are such awful, naughty things. Every word, every concept—it will mean something else to someone else. This was why I was thinking of puppies. This was why I was thinking of you, Elise.
You can tell the difference between a puppy and a small dog by their paws. Puppies have these big, clunky feet that they hardly know how to use because they’ve yet to grow into them. It’s their first time being alive, having paws; everything is new and amazing to them. A small dog has already seen the world. Their paws are much smaller, more proportional. Puppies possess an uncoordinated jaunt. The small dog is nimble. A puppy eats ferociously. A small dog may, too, but it has the life experience to understand that such voracity is rarely needed. The puppy is crass; the small dog is mature and obedient. Despite all these similarities, you, Elise, are not a puppy; you are a small dog. Despite being whelp-fuzzy through all those glasses, warping day by day, and changing and growing so fast with a speed that can only be attributed to newborn development, you are a small dog. Despite who you are and what you are made of, despite how everything may seem, you are my idea of a small dog. Therefore, you are not a little girl. You are made of fear and sadness; you are made of dreams. You are such a beautiful amalgamation of love and wishes and hope. On paper, you are composed of everything that makes up a human, someone’s precious little girl, and yet, you are not. How tragic that is. No matter how much any sad, evil Geppetto in his high-rise workshop wishes, you will never be a real girl. You will have to get by simply being the platonic ideal of one. But, on the bright side, this will bring you no sadness, no upset. You will feel nothing at all because at the end of the day, you are nothing.
Oh, Elise, how I envy you. I wish I could be nothing and still glow as you do. I think you glow because you are nothing. I wish you could read this, feel how I feel, and understand my envy for your existence, but you cannot. This is because you are not my wish to be fulfilled. You’re Mori’s. You are, fundamentally, Mori. You are his most intimate desires realised, a heart outside of the body, walking and talking and giggling as you do. I never considered Mori’s heart would be as lovely as you are. Mori’s heart having big blue eyes and rosy cheeks and a penchant for cakes and poofy dresses—how could I anticipate that? Mori having a heart at all was a shock to me. We’re more alike than you think, than anticipated, Elise. We’re not quite blood and water, but not quite oil and water either. You could never run into my arms and live to tell the tale, but I think that’s why I’m so important to you. I’m important to you because, in many ways, I am the practical idea of Elise put into action. We, together, are a dove flying into a window pane. You are a small dog. You are the idea of a small dog, treated as a forever puppy, so we may never risk loving something only for a while. You are the tiny puppy in the pet store window who puts a sad pit in the stomach of anybody who knows better, who knows what you are and where you come from. I am picked up off the street, covered in fleas and mange. I am a bite risk being put to sleep. We, together, are potential energy. You are a dream, I am a nightmare reality. We, together, glow.
I’m writing to you because there isn’t anybody else I could write to. I’m selfishly using you to fulfil my dreams, too. I know you’ll never read or understand this letter, or the ones I plan to send after this, because you’re a facsimile of Mori’s impressions of other people. But that still means you’re me, if only a little bit. You’re every happy and guilty memory of me that Mori has, and somewhere, probably close to the beginning, but maybe towards the end, you were really me for a bit. And while you were me, you were loved. Even with a little bit of me inside of you, you’re still loved. You’re able to accept the love and turn it into something good. That’s another reason why I’m so envious jealous of you, Elise. You can accept love and love and love and love while I can’t. I have a limit. It’s like brushing your teeth for too long. Your gums bleed, and you can’t brush them again without reopening any old wounds, even if brushing your teeth is good for you and you have to do it regularly. I can’t be loved regularly. You can be loved in every way imaginable because you are love. And you can’t even exist enough to know how lucky you are. You are everything I wish I could be, Elise. I will say it again and again because I think one day it will come true: I will be nothing like you, and we will be happy together.
Until then, I will write you letters.
Sincerely,
Osamu Dazai