Winter's End

It's finally that time of year when spring, with its cherry blossoms, seems to be coming to an end. Thanks to that, I can devote myself to writing some rambling prose.

Let me recount some old memories of Haruomi Hosono.

When I was in junior high school, I started listening to Haruomi Hosono thanks to the internet. I think I saw someone mention him as an influential artist and that prompted me to give him a listen.
At the same time, two of my friends at the time also liked Haruomi Hosono, so he often came up in conversation.

Fading city lights
If stardust and rain fall
The last light flows back to the sea
Winter's end, the changing of seasons
A single sneeze

The town where I spent my childhood was a residential area with absolutely nothing else.
There were no trains, and it was in an awkward location, about a 30-40 minute bike ride to the station.

If I went to my grandpa's house, there used to be enough snow in winter to build igloos, but I haven't seen that much snow even in that rural area for the past 10 years. I wonder if “global warming” is really progressing. Deep down, I think, “Can you really say that just by looking at a tiny sliver of time, a mere 10 years, within the thousands of years of Earth's timeline?” So, I'm not thinking about it in such an extreme way.

There are times when I feel sad that as I get older, I don't feel anything special about the changing of seasons, and my sense of playfulness seems to have diminished. However, I hate summer pools because I can't swim, so maybe it's a good thing that my feelings about them haven't changed.

Going to small mountains to collect insects, picking up mysterious mushrooms, or keeping Japanese grass lizards – such childlike activities seem to be decreasing. Instead, I'm always playing games or have a trash bag full of origami that I made after researching on the PC.
The latter connects to my current tinkering with computers, so in that sense, it might not be entirely true to say that I never return to my childlike self.

Cloudy sky, about to fall
The city lights that bother me
Announcing an important time
Crows and chickens, cock-a-doodle-doo
Winter's end, the changing of seasons
A single sneeze
There's much to talk about
Just a single sneeze

Playing tag at a nearby park, and going home when the city bells rang at 5 PM and bats started flying in the park.
I have such memories from my time until the second grade of elementary school, so looking back, I feel that residential area had its own kind of richness.
After that, I moved to a residential area closer to the station (though it was still about a 30-minute bike ride to the station), so there were no bats, and no mountains nearby. The only exciting things were places where they were trying to clear-cut mountains in a development zone, or back alleys and shortcuts on the way home where adult magazines were sometimes found. I ended up breaking a bone there, and both my friends and I got a huge scolding at school.

Shadows of people come and go
Tea and kindness exchanged
A spoonful of coarse sugar
Black tea and human bonds
Winter's end, the changing of seasons
A single sneeze
There's much to talk about, but just
A single sneeze

All those friends are gone, and I moved again, so it's another reset.
Encounters with people inevitably come with partings.

Last year, I revisited a coffee shop in Tokyo that I used to go to in high school, where they played Haruomi Hosono. They still remembered me. It's a memorable place where I also had a photo exhibition. I feel a bit apologetic for the kind of person I've become...

At that time, I was heavily influenced by “The Catcher in the Rye” and was wandering around during long breaks, so that timing, combined with the fact that I had never heard Haruomi Hosono's album “HoSoNoVa” before, led to it playing. The song playing there was “Walker's Blues,” which I still listen to constantly. I actually thought about making this blog title "Walker's Blues," but it felt a bit too stylish, and I'm not "walking" these days. I just happened to want to listen to “Winter's End,” so I simply named it that. If I ever feel like being “stylish” and “walking,” I might make it the blog title, or I might never be “stylish,” or never “walk.”

Speaking of turning points in my life, it was the first place that accepted me for who I was, so it remains strongly in my memory, and it also became the impetus for me to visit various shops in Sendai afterward, for which I am very grateful.

And now, I've become a recluse again. Or rather, there's a lot I can learn from people, and I'm truly grateful, but there are also many things I can only learn when I'm alone, as I did when I was originally a recluse. So, I think I'll spend some time alone again, then wander around and hopefully find enjoyable places to go.

Speaking of that friend who liked Haruomi Hosono, whom I mentioned at the beginning, when I met them again last year, I realized they had developed depression. We ended up just drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes idly, saying “this and that.”
I often think, “I understand myself the least,” and I wonder if that's a factor that makes one prone to depression. If you communicate with people, you can somehow get an idea of how others perceive you, but otherwise, you'll just fall into a black hole of your own thoughts.

In that sense, by putting my thoughts into words on a blog like this, I can understand a little of what I was thinking and what kind of atmosphere I can objectively perceive. So, this site itself might be partly supporting me. I might get bored tomorrow, so I'll write while I can.