Chapter 3 Chapter 2 How did you survive?

Chapter 2 How did you survive? 1 Among the many memories about my grandmother, the last part is about when I was seven or eight years old, and it is about the war.My grandmother's name was Fudei (writing brush), and my grandmother said she only told me the secret of the name.Grandma said that just like the meaning of the name, she was born to record what happened in the forest.If Grandma actually jotted down something in her notebook, I'd really like to see it. I don't know what to worry about, anyway, I finally asked my grandmother what was recorded.Grandmother said, "No, I haven't. I still remember everything clearly! When I am older, I will write them down when I can't remember things. Then you have to help me." .”

I really want to help with this.Even if I wasn't trying to help, I loved listening to my grandmother's stories.A grandmother is someone who can tell vividly what she remembers.Every time she tells a story, she always speaks out, even the places, people, and names that I know, as well as the large flower bushes where the camellias bloom, and the person named Zaemon three generations ago, will tell me. appear in her story.When grandma talked about what she was happy about, she kept talking like she could sing. One of the stories my grandmother told was called "My Own Tree."grandmother said:

"The tree is high up in the woods, and every man in the valley has a tree of his own. The soul of man comes out from the root of his own tree, that is, the root of the tree, and goes down the valley to the newly born man. So, when a person dies, only the body is gone, but the soul will go back to the root of the tree.” I asked: "And where is my own tree?" "If a person who is about to die opens his soul eyes, he will know where his tree is!" Grandma replied to me. "I am anxious to know what it is doing right now? Having said that, if a smart soul is born, it will remember which tree root it came from. But ah, that is not something that can be said casually. And wow, if you go into the woods and accidentally stand under your own tree, you will meet that child when you are older. But, because children don’t know how to deal with it, so , it’s better not to get close to your own tree.”

Grandma warned me. Frankly, I deeply regret that I am not an intelligent soul who can remember "one's own tree".Once I walked into the depths of the forest alone, and stood under a big tree that I thought was very tall, and waited, thinking that my old self would come.If I can meet "that person" smoothly, I want to ask him questions, in the Mandarin I learned in school.I was well prepared to ask questions. ——How did you survive? The "how to live" here includes the two meanings of "by what method" and "why".When I was a child, I wanted to put these two meanings together to ask the question.Naturally, it is common practice to decide which of these two questions to ask first, and then to ask them one by one.But I just want to ask the two together, and I think "that person" will combine the two questions together to give me a good answer.

Nearly sixty years have passed, and I have become an old man who has lived day by day.Back in the woods of my hometown, although I still don’t know what kind of tree it is, but when I walked under that stalwart tree, I imagined that my childhood self more than half a century ago might wait there to ask questions like this . ——How did you survive? As an answer to this question, instead of a long talk, I have been writing novels.Now I think, how do I start to answer questions in the way of writing novels?This idea came from my reading Natsume Soseki's novel "Heart" countless times.Let me say a little bit on the topic of reading: If you feel that a book is really a good book, then please read it again after a period of time, and each time, use a colored pen of a different color to draw on the line, and write in the blank space. Miscellaneous feelings when reading.This is a beneficial way to read.

Let me go back to the original topic.In "Heart" I caught the following words to the young man from the man called "Sir" in the novel: "Remember, this is how I live." I realized that Soseki was writing novels as if he were having a long talk under his "own tree". There is another sentence in "Heart" that tempts me. "When my heart stops beating, I would be content to breathe new life into yours." I also dreamed while writing articles that after I leave this world, if my works can survive in the hearts of young people as a new life, that would be my happiness.However, I didn't have the courage to say it.Specifically, there is no courage to write books for young people and children.I know that this is the unfinished business of my forty years of writing.

2 Even so, gradually in my heart, the desire to write books for young people and children, as if chatting with them under "my own tree", became stronger and stronger. From the late autumn of 1999 to the early spring of this year.I lectured at the Free University of Berlin, and besides being impressed with the students there, I had another important experience.There are many Japanese people working in Berlin. Some have a family there, some have a father there, and some have a German father and a Japanese mother.Some of their children received primary and secondary education in German, and some studied in Japanese schools.

The children enter different schools to receive education, and the common wish of the parents is to let the children learn Japanese well.They funded and managed it by themselves, and established a Japanese cram school using the school building on public school holidays.I know the parents who are engaged in the management of this school, especially one of the mothers who often helps me to buy daily necessities.The mother invited me to school to speak to the children. I had this experience four years ago in Princeton, USA.I figured out "methods" one by one, because for the children listening to the lecture, if someone they don't know at all suddenly gives a lecture one day, they will naturally not be interested; In front of them, I don't know what to say at all.

The way I came up with was to let the children who came to listen to my speech do a composition in advance.As for me, I use the red pen to correct inaccurate and wrong sentences, and adjust the order of the articles so that the most wanted content clearly stands out.The old Japanese saying for this method is called "timing", and when you add this modification to your own poems or articles, it is called "scrutiny". However, I don't use these two words. I like to revise other people's articles as wholeheartedly as my own articles, so as to make them perfect. I like to use the word "elaboration" in English for this method. to express.

why?Because the word "timing" has a condescending feeling like a teacher correcting a student's composition; as for "deliberation", maybe this is just my own understanding, and it seems to contain the meaning of "out of hobby".As for the word "elaborate", I think it means standing on the same position as the other party, pondering the article together, and both parties are equally promoted in this action. I modified the experience gained at Princeton and carried it out in Berlin in the same way.The topic of the essay in Berlin was "Comparison of Germans and Japanese".After the topics were assigned, each child had a careful discussion with the teacher about what to write, and the children also included their experience of enrolling in a Japanese language school in the essay, which was really an interesting composition.

The beginning of the composition clearly introduces the content of repeated discussions with the teacher. The children have seriously thought about their own experiences. In the composition, they can see their fair observation attitude towards Germans and Japanese.During the reading process, I clearly felt the language sensitivity of children who live in foreign cities and can communicate in two languages.That summer, the mothers got together to further develop my "elaborate work", using a binding method that can clearly see what was done and how it was revised, and made the children's compositions into a beautiful composition collection. To reward the children for their hard work, I wrote an article about my childhood memories and about my son who was born with a physical disability, and read it aloud to everyone.The German reporter who learned about this lecture asked me to rewrite the article in the form of answering questions from German children and publish it in a South German newspaper.Starting from changing essays for children living in Berlin, I feel that my enthusiasm for writing essays for young people and children has grown and borne fruit.This fruit is collected at the very front of this book. 3 Later, when I returned to Japan, I once again had the idea to continue writing this kind of article, which originated from a few days of long talks with the conductor Seiji Ozawa on the highlands of Nagano.The content of Mr. Ozawa's talk has been published in the newspaper, and I think many parents must have read it. Before this, whether it was summer or winter, my wife and I had never spent a few days in a quiet hotel like this.In the past few days, we walked on the grass full of yellow flowers in the morning. This Compositae plant blooms yellow flowers in the morning, and rolls them into thin rods at night, like purple pencils.During the day, I chatted with Mr. Ozawa, and at night, I watched Mr. Ozawa teach young people music together with the former principal violinist of the famous American quartet, directing them to play string quartets or cello concertos bit by bit. Listening to and watching the performance practice of young performers under the command of Mr. Ozawa, I think this is a great example of "elaborate production".It was a scene of a girlish violinist playing a quartet with a viola player and a cello player.Mr. Ozawa interrupted them and asked the performers to think about what kind of music they want to create, how to play it, and how to listen to the music played by their companions.When saying these words, Ozawa used very simple and easy-to-understand language, and assisted with facial expressions and body movements, and he was persuasive.Under the guidance of Mr. Ozawa, the young people finally played music with their own characteristics, which is beautiful and full of emotional connotation, relying on excellent skills and repeated practice. While watching, I was intoxicated by the music.At the same time, I thought, young people, I have witnessed you completing an important moment of "elaborate" in your life. I think Mr. Ozawa must be full of expectation—after his own heart stops beating, the new life in these young hearts will continue to beat—guiding them. "There is no time! I really don't know how to make up!" Mr. Ozawa often said. The conductor Seiji Ozawa was the first person who made the Japanese play European music to the world level and was recognized by the Europeans.He is working hard to connect young people to the cause.In the tense work of flying around the world, this time he came to the plateau, I saw the joy flowing in his heart... Although I don't have the opportunity to speak "lively" as long as I'm in Japan, I want to convey to young people more widely what I know and understand as a novelist so far.