Canon's Diary

“Check-out, please,” I said to the woman at the front desk. Since I’d already paid by card, all I had to do was hand back the key.
“I’ll be back next week,” I added briefly. Caught off guard, she looked slightly confused but replied, “Oh, yes, of course.”
It was the last day of a four-night stay. A certain fatigue had begun to settle in. With a backpack slung over my shoulder and a black suitcase trailing behind me, I rode the escalator up toward the train station. The morning air was growing steadily warmer.

At the office, after a meeting with my supervisor, I was assigned a fair amount of drafting work. The afternoon was almost entirely consumed by a project handover meeting. For the first time in a while, it felt like real work had finally begun.

Since I had to return to Tokyo that evening, I gave my boss a quick farewell as soon as the closing chime sounded, and rushed toward the station. It was still bright when I left the office, but by the time I reached Kyoto Station and finished my meal on the Shinkansen, the view outside the window had grown dim, tinged with a certain sadness.
Right now, I’m writing this from the Shinkansen bound for Shin-Yokohama.

This is a continuation of what I wrote yesterday.
In my early childhood, my mother instilled in me the teaching of “compassion.”
But by the upper grades of elementary school, I began to feel something wasn’t right.
To my mother, her religion was flawless, but in practice, “Praying” and being “compassionate” couldn’t solve everything. For starters, I couldn’t talk to my classmates properly. I didn’t know why. Compared to others, something seemed missing in me.

Around third grade, I started attending a soccer class at Komazawa Park. I didn’t seem to dislike physical activity—I remember chasing after the ball the instructor kicked, purely and joyfully.
Even then, I couldn’t make friends. Soccer is a team sport. The idea of teammates, positions, defenders and attackers, passing and coordinated plays—that concept escaped me entirely until I graduated elementary school.
I was bad at “communication.”
But I don’t think I was stupid. I could memorize whatever the teacher said in class, and never needed to study before a test. Still, I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t connect with people. So I began to “copy” the personality of someone nearby—an act that seemed to smooth out the awkwardness around me.

When a classmate dropped an eraser, I picked it up.
When someone was being bullied, I tried to talk to them.
I liked animals and volunteered to take care of the chickens and ducks at school.
People said I was “kind.”
But something was missing—something essential.

I now think it was the act of expressing my self—my ego.
Studies suggest that the concept of self typically emerges around 18 to 24 months old.
At that age, children begin to recognize themselves in the mirror, and differentiate “me” from others. Later, between ages four and five, a more complex awareness develops—the understanding that others have different thoughts, and that others see them in certain ways. This is what we call metacognition or self-consciousness.

When I spoke to bullied classmates or took care of animals, I don’t think I was acting out of my own volition. I was simply following the teachings of “compassion.” The “compassion” instilled by my mother from an early age became a kind of curse—one that suppressed my ego.

What did I truly want to do?
I didn’t know.
And so I entered adolescence.
Suppressing myself only seemed to make the monster inside me grow larger.

Around 9 p.m., rain was falling in Tokyo. I took the bus and climbed the steep slope home. A package of moving boxes from the relocation company had arrived. I stepped into the room, took a sip of my usual scotch, and let out a small sigh.