I don’t get along with people generally and it had been so back in kindergarten already. I hated everything there. Other kids seemed too stupid and childish to me. The activities in the class were relentlessly silly. The teachers treated us like a bunch of fools. But seeing other kids do, I always thought they were actually a bunch of fools. I wished they grew up and got smarter fast. Soon after I got in the kindergarten, going there every day became a torture to me. Sleeplessness on weekdays was my norm. I got fed up with the whole stupidities there and stopped talking with anybody. Some kids even believed that I was mute. They played outside at recess but I had never joined them. I spent the recess alone in the classroom, rounding the clay into balls and rolling it into strings. I didn’t make them to form something by them. Balls and strings were the finished products. When I used up the whole chunk of my clay, I reversed the balls and strings to a wad and started making them all over again. I spent two years just doing that everyday while I was disgusted by other kids playing, jumping, and screaming outside childishly…

I don’t have a child and probably won’t have one all my life. But in my dreams, I’ve cuddled my baby for several times. It’s a boy and always the same baby, and I firmly believe I have a child in a different dimension. One day, in my dream, or in that dimension, I saw him in his twenties. It was the future. He lived in a secluded village and was devoted to an unfamiliar future sport. He didn’t notice me as I was watching him from somewhere far. I was so happy to see my baby have grown up and see him not working at an office as a businessman. An elderly man passed by me and I asked him about the sport my son was practicing intently. My question was if the sport was some kind of official, recognized, or popular, which was somehow a possible way to make money. He told me that this sport was completely unknown to the public and there was no event or competition, thus it never brought money whatsoever, not a cent. I burst into tears for joy. Not only he didn’t become an office worker for a steady income, but also he chose the profession that was totally unrelated to money or fame. He wasn’t interested in them. His only interest was the sport. I couldn’t stop crying for joy, thinking how ideally he had grown up and what a perfect son he was to me. I felt thoroughly proud of him and grateful for him to become as he was. Since I saw that dream, I’ve felt more confident of myself, because I’ve raised an honorable child in the other dimension…

My parents married by an arranged marriage. Marriage used to be a knot between two families, not individuals in Japan. A mutual acquaintance introduced my parents to both families with their photographs. Although my parents didn’t like each other, the tie as the family seemed favorable to their parents. My mother agreed with the marriage very unwillingly after the fortuneteller said that she would handle money by a million if she married my father. As for my father, he reluctantly obeyed his parents’ decision because he had never said ‘no’ to his father in his life. A month after the wedding, my mother decided to leave my father because she couldn’t stand to live with his parents any longer. She went back to her parents’ home but her father didn’t allow her to come back. She had no place to go and gave in to her dismal marriage. And I was born. I wasn’t the result of a happy marriage, but I embodied my mother’s resignation…