#82 To Write is to Live: A Tribute to Tomihiro Hoshino

"Mom, why did this person want to draw pictures even if it meant holding a pen in his mouth?"
"Maybe it's because for Mr. Hoshino, 'drawing' was 'living'."

Tomihiro Hoshino, who passed away on April 28, 2024, was a Japanese poet and painter. When he was a junior high school teacher, an injury sustained while teaching left him completely paralyzed from the neck down. However, he began to draw pictures and write poems by holding a brush in his mouth using the slight movement he had in his neck, and eventually, his art began to capture the hearts of many people.

I read Tomihiro Hoshino's autobiography, "Flowers of Infinite Gentleness," in the late 1980s, when this country was still booming with economic prosperity. I was still in elementary school at the time, and I remember finding this book on a church bookshelf by chance and reading it all at once, drawn in by the cover featuring beautiful flower paintings.

At that time, when there was almost no technology or system to allow people with disabilities to participate in society as there is today, paralysis of the lower body due to a spinal cord injury was an event equivalent to having almost all hope for the future cut off.

He could not work, nor could he marry and have a family. He could not go to the bathroom by himself, nor could he even scratch an itchy spot on his head. For a young man in his early twenties, I think it must have been an agonizing suffering that would make it understandable to despair of life.

It seems that Mr. Hoshino began drawing pictures due to a small, accidental event. He tried holding a pen in his mouth just to write a message on a wedding gift for an acquaintance, but all he could write was a single dot. Someone who saw this and felt for him skillfully moved the paper to create the signature "O-Tomi." This, it is said, was the beginning.

However, that dot eventually became letters, and then letters became correspondence. Furthermore, the flower paintings he added to the side of his letters gradually began to attract attention from those around him. His paintings and poems, drawn with a brush held in his mouth, began to be exhibited all over the country, and his works were even included in textbooks. Eventually, two "Tomihiro Hoshino Art Museums" were built in Japan.

What if I were to suddenly lose the freedom of my body one day, like Mr. Hoshino? What if I were to spend my days unable to do anything for myself, requiring care from others for every aspect of my daily life? And what if that life were to continue for decades to come?

In such days, "drawing" must have been a means to express his thoughts, a way to maintain connections with people, and above all, a moment where he could feel the meaning of his own existence. It must also have been a way to repay his family, who were caring for him around the clock.

"I don't care what anyone says when they see my paintings. It is enough if my mother just looks at my paintings and says 'Oh,' with admiration."
I feel like there was a passage like that in his book.

In fact, until just recently, I had been vaguely feeling,
"I might stop writing."
This is because a side job I started in my spare time from writing was going unexpectedly (?) well, and the situation had reached a point where switching to that might guarantee a more stable income.

"If that's the case, is there any reason to keep writing even if it means going through such a hard time?"

In the first place, I started writing to help with my own and my family's living expenses. But if the income issue were cleared, what on earth would I continue to write for? Without finding a clear answer to that, I felt that writing might just quietly disappear from my life.

I never expected that from my own lips, words like,
"Because 'to draw' is 'to live'"
would come out. But when asked why Tomihiro Hoshino never stopped drawing throughout his life, I couldn't come up with any other answer.

So, why did those words come out of me?
It is because,for me too, "to write" is "to live."

Of course, I have not experienced the agonizing suffering in life that Mr. Hoshino did, nor have I created masterpieces that move the hearts of many people.

But until now, I have used writing to support myself when I was about to collapse, to convey my thoughts, and to connect with others. Since I was a child, I have been introverted and bad at talking to others, but even so, I could not abandon the desire to connect with people.

It was writing that connected me to the world. A child who was content to just sit in the corner of an empty church room reading books alone, eventually decided to write their own words and go out into the world.

I might stop writing as a means of earning money, that is, as a freelance writer, someday. But I probably won't be able to completely erase writing from within myself. After all, you can't just start or stop a way of life like you're saying "I've started serving cold noodles."

Among the many poems left behind by Tomihiro Hoshino, there is one work that remains particularly close to my heart.

By now, Tomihiro Hoshino must have reunited with his mother in heaven.
And with his body now completely free, he may be gently patting her on the shoulder.