Reading "Wild Dash"

(Written on June 25, 2024. My father passed away in mid-August after that.)

"Wild Dash: Disability, My Brother, and Anthropology" by Kohei Inose (Mishimasha)

For instance, we tend to form hypotheses about people with tactile hypersensitivity, such as, 'This person is like this because they are tactilely hypersensitive.'
We might think that when he shouts while walking through a crowd, he is shouting for his own sake so that people will avoid his sensitive self.
Seiji Iwahashi, who is introduced in this book, rethinks and shifts that hypothesis.

Perhaps, he thinks that other people are just as tactilely hypersensitive as he is. Maybe his shouting was not to protect himself, but a form of consideration for others—a 'shout of concern for others.'
He realizes that people with minority physical traits are not just those who are cared for, but also those who care for others, and he shifts the lines he had unconsciously drawn.

When we imagine to that extent, the possibility of barely connecting with others is born.

The author, Kohei Inose, uses the word 'kasuru' (to graze or brush against).

"My brother continues to dash away from the lines I draw, feeling proud that I have understood his dash. My understanding and descriptions, as I struggle to capture his existence, are slipped through by my brother. That is the irreplaceability of his existence, and the poignancy of living with others. Furthermore, the fact that my understanding and descriptions barely graze my brother is the joy of living with others." (p.8)

(The following is my own story.) When I talk to my father in his hospital bed, his remarks are sometimes nonsensical or disconnected from reality. We don't really see what kind of people we are to each other. Even so, there are times when I feel we have had a truly meaningful exchange.
In the end, I don't understand anyone (not even myself), and perhaps understanding is not the goal. Reading the word 'graze,' I felt it made sense; I felt convinced that it is nothing more than that, and that perhaps it is more important not to seek excessive meaning.

The author imagines that his brother experiences their grandfather's death and their father's aging in a way different from his own. However, faced with the irreplaceability of his brother, who slips through words and interpretations, he does not arbitrarily assign words to him.
Faced with his shouting brother, he does not interpret his brother's behavior, but instead turns the question back on himself, who did not shout.

"Where we are connected and where we are misaligned—both are important." (p.243)

There is a passage where his aging father, who could no longer move as he wished, began to read the intentions of the author's brother with hesitant words that evoked the margins of things.
By gaining frailty, a hesitation toward making definitive statements was born. The weight of those margins resonates in my heart.

The author states, "The poignancy of living is that what was once at the center of it is gradually, but surely, lost." (p.256)
On the other hand, he describes, while carefully weaving exchanges with family and friends, that within the things that continue to be lost, there are irreplaceable experiences that, though they only take shape for a fleeting moment, make everything around them tremble.