The 'That' I Lack [Essay]

I met up with someone at the central ticket gate of Ueno Station.

It had been over a decade since I last used the central gate at Ueno, and I stood there for a moment, dazed, wondering if it had always been this beautiful.
There was a dead end for the tracks right inside the central gate (I believe it's called a terminal station layout). Living in Tokyo, I usually think of Ueno as just a stop on the Yamanote Line, but I felt that it truly is a departure and arrival station.

The elevated platforms overlap the ground-level platforms, which stretch out from the gate without any wall partitions, creating an open, atrium-like space. I had always thought of Ueno Station as crowded, with low ceilings and covered in black-and-yellow 'watch your head' stripes, but the scene before my eyes was surprisingly open and 'good,' and it squeezed the soft part of my chest.

My childhood memories are overwhelmingly stronger, so I always imagine Ueno Station as being under construction. Ueno Station, Shinagawa Station... the dimly lit corridors I walked with my mother, the dull pain of my arm being pulled a bit too hard (for some reason, my mother was always in a hurry when I was a child).

While wandering inside the central gate, I found a monument to a poem by Takuboku Ishikawa.

As a lazy student, it wasn't until I was quite an adult that I realized what 'it' (so) referred to.

When I was a child, I thought 'it' was something special.
A special something called 'it.' A kind of thing only adults knew, something special, yet something everyone was 'supposed' to know once they became an adult.

So this poem was about Ueno. I stared intently at the monument.
The Takuboku who had lived inside me until today was standing at an unpaved bus rotary in the countryside, and if anything, he was carrying his mother on his back, and he had even walked three or four steps while carrying her... somehow, various things had mixed together and a wrong image had grown. I felt a little embarrassed.
I see, the station is the train station, Takuboku was in Tokyo, and Takuboku was alone. I realized this with a deep sense of understanding.
Although I'm embarrassed, I also think that the Takuboku who lived inside me until today seems a little happier.

My mother came to Tokyo from Hiroshima to enter university.
Back then, it apparently took 12 hours to travel between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Setting aside whether Ueno was the first place she visited in Tokyo, I wondered what my mother's state of mind was at that time, and as I looked at both the train stopped at the elevated platform on the second floor and the parent and child sitting wearily on a chair on the first floor, my chest was squeezed tight again.

My mother, who had intended to go to a local junior college, apparently came to Tokyo 'after listening to a friend who wanted to study pharmacy' and 'without really intending to.'

Did my 18-year-old mother seek 'it' in a place far, far away?

My mother, who drifted to Tokyo from Hiroshima, and my father, who was poor and couldn't tell his parents he had been accepted into medical school, met on the pharmacy campus. By chance.

And I am the product of that chance.
I was born in Chiba, went to university in Kanagawa, and now live in Tokyo.
Even now, and back in college, I could return to my parents' home after an hour and a half on the train.

I have no hometown. To be precise, I don't understand what nostalgia is.
I don't have the 'it' I thought I would know once I became an adult.
I often think that because I have no hometown, I might be missing something definitive.
Although not having a hometown is very convenient in a way.

Perhaps because I was thinking about such things, I suggested to my husband, who appeared for our meeting, that we eat lunch at 'Juraku,' a restaurant across from Ueno Station that has been around for 100 years.
'Juraku' was the first 'Tokyo restaurant' I entered by myself when I was in my third year of junior high.
Two friends and I, as third-year junior high students, entered the restaurant trying to act as grown-up as possible. I remember we were so stiff with nervousness that we took the strange approach of sitting side-by-side on the sofa side of a four-person table.
I ate a pork cutlet rice at 'Juraku' for the first time since junior high. I don't remember what I ate that day, so I don't even know if it's nostalgic anymore, and the shop had been completely renovated.

However, while sitting across from my husband (properly this time) at 'Juraku,' the soft part deep in my chest was squeezed again, and I thought that perhaps this might be a fragment of my 'it'.
While burning my tongue on the pork cutlet rice.

The End

I participated in the project by Chichukaiseikiko-sama.
It was fun. Thank you very much.
Okunomoto

I submitted this to the Creative Awards (2025.5.27)

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