What I Recorded on My Cassette Player as a High Schooler—Why a 52-Year-Old Keeps Writing, Taught by Tunnels, Haruki Murakami, and Riho Makise

1:00 AM.

I sat by my cassette player, waiting for the 120-minute normal tape to start spinning.

As a high school student, I recorded Tunnels' All Night Nippon every week.

This program, which began on October 15, 1985, was a two-hour slot from 1:00 AM to 3:00 AM on Tuesday nights.

That show had a strange jinx.

Normal radio shows talk for a few minutes and then shout the program name. But Takaaki Ishibashi was different.

His stories from his days at Teikyo High School were too funny to stop. Before I knew it, over an hour had passed. Finally, he would shout, "Tunnels' All Night Nippon!!"

Starting at 1:00 AM, there were times when the program call wouldn't happen until after 2:00 AM.

Even so, I couldn't stop laughing.

I was a high school student, and I had classes the next day.

Sometimes I would fall asleep.

That's why I recorded it on my cassette player.

I put everything on a 120-minute tape and listened to it over and over again.

At the time, this program's ratings surpassed Beat Takeshi's All Night Nippon to take the top spot.

It is a program that Ninety-nine, Masahiro Nakai, and Tsunku♂ have explicitly stated influenced them.

Everyone said, "Ishibashi is the funny one." I thought so too.

But I loved Noritake Kinashi's artistic sensibility.

He didn't make people laugh with logic, but with the atmosphere.

The presence of someone who possesses something unexplainable—that was Noritake Kinashi.

Around the same time, the '3M' appeared on 'Minasan no Okage Desu'.

Rie Miyazawa. Riho Makise. Alisa Mizuki.

It was an era when they were called the '3M,' taking the initials of the three.

This program began its regular broadcast on October 13, 1988, and recorded a peak viewership rating of 29.5% (March 30, 1989).

From 1989 to 1994, it held the number one spot for annual average viewership ratings for variety shows for six consecutive years. The average viewership rating was 20.1%.

The one I liked the most was Riho Makise.

The actress who became famous overnight for her appearance in the 1989 JR Tokai Christmas Express commercial, running to the station while out of breath—she was appearing in Tunnels' comedy sketches.

That same Riho Makise appeared in the film 'Tsugumi' (1990, directed by Jun Ichikawa), based on the novel by Banana Yoshimoto.

I went to the movie theater. The film could not be called a masterpiece.

But after I got home, I read the original novel.

Banana Yoshimoto's 'Tsugumi'—the moment I read it, a pain shot through my chest. The fragility of youth, the sensation of time that cannot be reclaimed. Things that were not conveyed in the film were contained within the text.

'There are things that only written words can do.'

That was the moment I experienced that for the first time.

There is a line I encountered during that same period.

Haruki Murakami's debut work 'Hear the Wind Sing'—published on July 23, 1979, the winner of the Gunzo New Writers' Prize.

Near the beginning, there is a story about the protagonist and the Rat drinking a 25-meter pool's worth of beer over the course of one summer. It says it was a summer so boring that they wouldn't have survived otherwise.

When I read that one line, I felt as if something had opened up.

I learned that literature is the ability to write about boredom as boredom, and to depict a wasted summer as a wasted summer.

I went straight on to read "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (1985).

A structure where two worlds alternate—the "world of the Calcutec" and the "End of the World." Two stories moving in parallel that finally intersect at a single point.

For me, having spent 40 years as an engineer designing parallel processing, this structure pierced me to the bone.

Haruki Murakami doesn't write with logic. But it is designed.

"It can be read with emotion, but it is built with structure"—that was my gateway into writing.

Writing became a habit.

I wrote in the middle of the night. Haruki Murakami says he wrote at a set time every morning. I wrote in the middle of the night. Our styles are different. But I think the feeling of "not being able to help but write" was the same.

Before I knew it, I had written 135 books.

I wasn't asked by anyone to do it. I didn't write them thinking they would sell, either.

It's just that the feeling of "I won't survive if I don't write" has continued since those days in front of the boombox in the middle of the night.

Now that I'm 52, I've watched over 1,000 movies in theaters, and I define films using AI and data.

But my starting point is in front of that boombox.

Takaaki Ishibashi's unstoppable talk. Noritake Kinashi's indescribable atmosphere. The way Riho Makise runs. The ache in the chest from Banana Yoshimoto's "Tsugumi." Haruki Murakami's 25-meter pool.

It's all connected.

Writing has been, ever since those days, an act of "I won't survive unless I do this."

Before I knew it, I had written 135 books.

The continuation of my thoughts can be found in the lab. 500 yen per month.

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