My First Encounter with "Literature" Began with Rock Music

What are literature and literary arts, anyway?

I wonder if any middle schooler could answer that immediately. I was just an ordinary middle schooler hanging around in a bedroom town in the suburbs of Kanto.
I would blankly stare at a girl in my class named Hashimoto every day, thinking, "She's so cute..." or Hiraki and I, who was in the same class, would test each other by punching each other in the face, wondering, "Does it hurt if we land a solid punch on each other's faces?"
As for the conclusion on the solid punch, yes, the face definitely hurts. But I learned that an untrained fist hurts even more.

There's no way a silly middle schooler like that could understand the meaning of literature or literary arts.
I did read books to some extent.
When I was in third grade, I spent my time in the school library reading The Fiend with Twenty Faces, and I remember the darkness outside the window when the teacher told me to go home early. I was convinced that the Fiend with Twenty Faces was definitely in that darkness. I didn't just tear up; I ran through the empty school building crying my eyes out, ignoring all the traffic lights, and stumbling my way home.
Once I entered middle school, I read whatever I could find on my father's bookshelf, like Morio Kita, Ken Kaiko, Kunio Yanagita, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I thought Akutagawa was a crazy guy who was still alive and had named an award after himself.
(It might have been because the Akutagawa books I was reading were new editions, or maybe the books were just clean.)

I had never even thought about the meaning of literature or literary arts themselves.

I did listen to music.
Shows like Yoru no Hit Studio or The Best Ten.
I talked with Hiraki about how it would be seriously scary if we got scolded by Akina Nakamori.
"It wouldn't be a solid punch, right?"
"It would be a kick."
"Wouldn't a slap look more dramatic?"
"What about a knife?"
"Do you want to get stabbed?"
"If I'm going to be stabbed by Kyoko Koizumi with a smile, that's fine by me."
"I can't keep up with you."

That was when Yutaka Ozaki appeared. He was annoyingly intense—no, passionate. It was clearly different from anything I had heard before.

But there was one lyric that caught my attention.

The scene immediately came to mind. A boy skipping class, lying on the school lawn, blankly thinking about his future. But he's still inside the school.
And that's what caught me. I'd read this somewhere before.

Was it on my dad's bookshelf, or in a textbook? I felt like I had seen it somewhere.
Yutaka Ozaki and Takuboku Ishikawa. They share the same worldview.
Ozaki probably traced the worldview of this poem.
Takuboku Ishikawa was from the Meiji era. Takuboku's world appeared before my eyes through Ozaki.
Takuboku Ishikawa, Yutaka Ozaki, and I were connected at that moment.

I decided to lie on the grass just like Takuboku and Ozaki.
However, there is no grass at a public middle school. Besides, it's embarrassing to lie down at school. So, I lay down on the weeds in a nearby park.
It wasn't visible from the outside, but the rain from the previous day had pooled heavily under the grass. My school uniform ended up a mess.

Since then, I became interested in the "poetry" of Japanese rock. But there's rarely anything as expressive as that.
Hiraki handed me a tape.
"This is hard to listen to, but it's interesting."

It's incredibly cool.
Motoharu Sano's album "VISITORS".
It is said to be the first rap incorporating Japanese by a major label musician.

Is this what they call a metaphorical expression? Was it the same for Takuboku and Ozaki?
Do metaphorical expressions drive something like a "wedge" into people's hearts?
Then, an even more brilliant phrase appeared before me.

Does it take shining Freedom to break through steel-like Wisdom? Or is it that unless you obtain steel-like Wisdom, you can never reach a Freedom that keeps on shining?
Perhaps it's the latter.

I can no longer go back to The Best Ten.
By the time I was in high school, I spent a week commuting for an hour, muttering "steel-like Wisdom, Freedom that keeps on shining" to myself on the way to school.
I'm not 100% sure what this means. But what kind of phrase is it that makes you imagine it for a whole week?

Could this be what they call literature? Saying sad things are sad isn't literature, is it? That's probably right. Probably.
I felt like my first encounter with literature had opened a window.

The books I read changed a little.
Rereading the novels of Ken Kaiko that I had already read -> Hemingway, who has a similar vibe to Ken Kaiko -> Scott Fitzgerald, who was busy flirting and breaking up with Hemingway -> Haruki Murakami, who loved Fitzgerald -> Ryu Murakami, who visited the jazz bar Haruki Murakami ran in his youth.
I became completely immersed in the world of expression they created.
And they were all keeping questions. Keeping questions about everything—what their predecessors created, and what they themselves created.

It's thrilling, isn't it, the creative world?
What the greatest genius musician in history, Prince, is saying is the same stance as the sharp novelists I've read. There is no difference between music and novels when it comes to literature.
Anything you create by using your imagination because you feel a sense of discomfort with something in the present is literature. Novels, tanka, haiku, poetry, essays, scripts, manga, every kind of creative work, and "lyrics" too.

*

I encountered the Tokyo subway sarin attack. Fortunately, I was not harmed. I was a few trains behind. Before the Chiba line subway I was on entered the Kokkai-gijidomae station, the conductor barked over the announcement:
"Close the windows, close the windows!"
There were several people in orange protective suits moving on the station platform. Separated by a single window pane, there was an alien world that far exceeded our imagination.
It was something "smooth" and flat, repelling any particles that might try to befriend the world or draw close to it.

Haruki Murakami, who interviewed members of Aum Shinrikyo regarding the sarin attack, talks about something with this kind of meaning.

It's not something I can say easily, but I feel like it suggests many things.

In the end, no matter how many people around us are kind to us, we have no choice but to walk through the dark night alone. That tiny, very tiny light in that darkness must be what literature is.