Episode 2: The Other Side of the Sofa — Living Again While Carrying Scars

【Episode 2: Denial】— The Sinking Ship's Inquiry Committee and the Lightbulb That Won't Shine

My cell phone was a "bomb that could go off at any moment," ringing regardless of whether it was the middle of the night or a holiday. On a sinking ship with nowhere to run, I kept rowing with the eyes of a dead fish.

Then one day, a decisive incident occurred. A young employee I had been mentoring, unable to withstand the grueling shifts and pressure, collapsed from overwork during his shift and was rushed to the hospital.

The company tried to pin all the blame on me, the person in charge of the site. A cold, police-like interrogation by the head of human resources from headquarters. The organization treated me like a disposable gear, despite the fact that I had sacrificed my family life to protect the site.

"Play the role of that position."

The HR manager who grilled me so coldly. I even hated him at the time, but now that I'm 53, I understand a little. He, too, was just being forced to desperately play that cold-hearted "villain" while killing his own heart to protect the organization that was the company. Perhaps he, too, was a lonely man trying desperately to survive on that sinking ship.

There is something fundamentally twisted about a place where you have to wear a mask of a role and erase your own living, breathing heart to survive.

I decided to take off the mask and get off this sinking ship. One morning, my junior, Sato, who had supported the site as my right-hand man for many years, handed me his resignation with a trembling voice. When I looked into his eyes, which had grown more gray hair, I had no words to hold him back.

Exhausted like mud, I returned to my apartment and collapsed onto that 20-year-old sofa.

Staring at the ceiling, I was mentally and completely denying the first half of my life.

"What on earth was my 50 years of life for? Wasn't I just consumed and thrown away?"

That was when it happened.

"—Hmph, you still have that pathetic look on your face."

From the darkness, sparks scattered as if a machine had short-circuited, and the nostalgic scent of oil and iron drifted through the air.

Startled, I looked up to see an old man sitting across from me on the sofa, wearing oil-stained work clothes and sporting explosive white hair. In his hand, he held a prototype lightbulb with its wiring clumsily exposed.

It was the phantom of that nostalgic figure—the man who, when I was young, lived at the factory and was called the "Legendary Demon Factory Manager," creating countless products. He was the self-made veteran engineer whom the site staff called "Doc" with awe.

"Doc...? Did you come to laugh at me? As you can see, I gave everything for the company, only to be treated like a criminal and kicked out in the end. All the effort I put in was just a 'failure'."

Seeing me spit that out with self-mockery, Doc snorted.

"Failure? No. That's just 'experimental data'."

"...Experimental data?"

“That’s right. Have you forgotten how many prototypes we went through and how many defective products we produced just to bring one new machine or product into the world? People around us call those ‘thousands of failures,’ but I have never once thought of them as failures. That’s because I discovered thousands of variations of valuable data, such as ‘this design won’t work’ or ‘this material will break.’ Manufacturing and life are the same. If you don’t produce defective products, you’ll never reach the right answer.”

“Your generation has lived through truly frustrating times. When you were young, you endured power harassment from above, and when it was finally your turn to teach, you were suddenly expected to treat the younger generation like fragile glass in the name of ‘compliance.’ That’s not all. The analog craftsmanship you desperately hammered into your bodies was suddenly forced to be redone by the massive wave of ‘digital.’ You must have clung on for dear life to keep from being left behind by the dizzying changes in the rules of the era.”

“But Taka, in the narrow gap of that rapidly changing era, you who endured the unreasonable pressure between those above and below, and who learned to read the moods and temperaments of those around you at lightning speed, possess an incredible ‘ability to adjust the atmosphere of a room’ that has been honed to the limit for the sake of survival. That adult attentiveness, which instantly picks up on the pain of others and tunes the discrepancies in the workplace, is the honorable medal you have earned for surviving the unreasonable Reiwa era.”

Doc stood up and pointed to the feet of my tattered sofa.

“The fact that you learned the cold-heartedness of organizations and the pain of losing colleagues is all poignant, yet gritty and realistic experimental data on ‘how humans break down’ and ‘what kind of distorted systems make a workplace miserable.’”

“In the grand experiment called life, there is nothing useless about the data you have accumulated by wearing yourself down. Don’t end it all with the word ‘failure.’ You have risked your own well-being to obtain first-class data that everyone wants.”

“How will you use that living data in your next stage?”

His words slowly seeped into the depths of my cold chest, bringing with them a growing warmth.

The air in the meeting room where I was unreasonably cornered was all just precious data for rebuilding my life from here on out...

When I realized it, the old man’s figure had vanished.

However, in my heart, the small lightbulb he left behind was definitely beginning to glow.

(Episode 2 - End)

Next Episode 3: The Challenge — The 34,210 Yen Brink and Warm Sandals